Saturn

The pale, pastel-pink globe,

embraced by jaunty rings,

on a vast, star-studded sky,

drifted, slowly,

across my viewfinder.

…Earth slowly rotated

under my feet,

summer-dawn breeze

gently ruffled my hair…

Saturn was there, immutable,

following its path of causes and effects,

and I thought of Galileo,

who laboured over  a block of glass,

grinding it into a lens,

to behold the same planet…

…and, through a gap of four hundred years,

he and I

looked into each other's eyes.