Poetry Shelf poem dispatch from USA: Michelle Elvy

By Poetry Shelf - Paula Green | Posted: Friday Mar 21, 2025

Motion sickness

Poetry Shelf poem dispatch from USA: Michelle Elvy | NZ Poetry Shelf

They return to earth, some nine
months later. Stretchers await,
teams at the ready for re-orientation
– beware space motion sickness.
Their sensory vestibular systems
are out of balance, their bodies fragile
from floating.

On the ground, they’ve missed too
much of everything: deportations
and wars, purges and violations
of civil rights, a nation’s constitution
– our sensory systems are off-kilter, too
our nerves grand-scale wreckage.
Do they know the world
down here – how much has changed
since they sped into space. Will they
recognise it again?

They planted seeds, nurtured life
spacewalked their way into record books
from their tidy small ship, then plunged
through the atmosphere, setting down
in the Atlantic after slowing to a mere
16 miles per hour. An exercise in patience,
their nine months of waiting.

Here, we are reeling, we are spinning.
We suffer motion sickness and wonder
when we will find a new equilibrium,
who carries a seed of hope, where in this world
there is a state of better being.
They say they are ready
to ‘tackle the earth’s gravity’
but have they really reckoned with
the gravity of here, of now?

Michelle Elvy
18 March 2025, on the return of NASA astronauts Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore

Michelle Elvy is a writer, editor and teacher of creative writing. Her books include the everrumble and the other side of better, she has edited numerous anthologies, including Te Moana o Reo | Ocean of Languages, edited with Vaughan Rapatahana (The Cuba Press), and the forthcoming Poto! Iti te kupu, nui te kōrero| Short! The big book of small stories, edited with Kiri Piahana-Wong (MUP).