~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Kendall Dunkelberg

The intergalactic traveler speaks of nebulae

Of course, the nebula only looks like a horse’s head

from earth’s perspective; beyond earth, an animal

like a horse is not a frame of reference that a traveler

would understand. From another galaxy, the same

stars might be given another name in another language,

incomprehensible here, spoken in inaudible frequencies

or recorded in a script both unintelligible and invisible

to the human eye. The same must be true of your Crab

and Magellanic Clouds, even your telescopes translate

what they see to the spectrum of color human eyes perceive.

Yet from within the nebulae, there can be no shape, only the

constant glow from myriads of protostars in proximity,

only the constant bath of warm radiation, deadly perhaps,

to those born outside, yet essential and life-giving to those

born within these nascent or dying stars, whereas from earth,

these nebulae appear as serene magical clouds, where earthlings

find faint images of themselves in a blur on a telescope lens,

or as multicolored swirls of beautiful, fantastical light.

Kendall Dunkelberg directs the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing and the Eudora Welty Writers’ Symposium at Mississippi University for Women. He is editor of Poetry South and has published four poetry collections, Tree Fall with Birdsong (Fernwood Press, 2025), Barrier Island Suite, Time Capsules, and Landscapes and Architectures, as well as the textbook, A Writer’s Craft: Multi-genre Creative Writing. His poems are also included in Southern Voices: Fifty Contemporary Poets and Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology.