Advent Calendar Day 1 - November 12
Excerpt from What Solitude Sees in Me: Uncollected Poems 1976-2023, by Miriam Sagan
Plus, today only, get 12% off this title in our bookstore—no code required.
“I’m certainly not the only writer who at the age of seventy has a file cabinet full of mysterious manila folders,” writes Miriam Sagan. “They might be obscurely labeled ‘drafts’ or ‘poems’ or even ‘Income tax—1986.’ And they might contain almost anything.”
Including, it turns out, this book of uncollected poems—and the poem below, our first gift to you this holiday season.
At the Observatory
Three little girls
ran up the hill
as Venus was setting
as if for a better view.
Through the telescope I saw
the planet as a crescent
twinkling in the atmosphere.
Pointing at the center
of the Milky Way
saw stars born and tied together
like siblings or aspen trees
Twin stars—one yellow,
one blue of Albireo
(eye of Cygnus the Swan)
clear sight of Jupiter
with its four moons
that let Galileo understand
we are not the center of the universe.
A fair-haired girl
was reading a book
by the light of the setting evening star
and later by her cell phone.
“You’ll ruin your eyes!”
I exclaimed as if I were her mother.
She laughed and turned the page.
Read more of these uncollected poems in WHAT SOLITUDE SEES IN ME, the latest career-spanning work from the Santa Fe poet Miriam Sagan.
Get 12% off this title until midnight Mountain time tonight, Wednesday, November 12.
About the Author
Miriam Sagan is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, fiction, and memoir. She is a two-time winner of the New Mexico/Arizona Book Award as well as a recipient of the City of Santa Fe Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and a New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award. She has been a writer-in-residence at four U.S. national parks, Yaddo, MacDowell, Kura Studio in Japan, Gullkistan in Iceland, and a dozen other remote and interesting places.