The Friday Poem

A poem every Friday

The Friday Poem on 03/05/2024

This poem, like the sextant, has elements of both the mythical and the modern. The mix of heavenly bodies, the wind and the salt, and that fabulously “chuntering” sea, plunges us into something elemental. At the same time, using plain language and loose, unrhymed tercets, Maria Castro Dominguez evokes the pulse and rhythm of the ocean. She makes the poem a celebration of the sextant, and of the sea itself, and perhaps also a kind of love poem, from mother to son, with hope for a “heart that never stops beating”.

Celestial Objects

My son sails the Mediterranean
and sends me a photo of a sextant from the deck:
mythical and modern.

What’s it used for? I write
even though I know
(my father was a sailor).

Yet I want him to describe it
in wind and salt 
and chuntering seas,

a field bisected
with its half-horizon mirror
separating blue from blue

and on the flip side,
celestial objects. You need 
a star, sunrise, the moon

for it to work, he’ll say,
the sea underscoring his voice 
like a heart that never stops beating.


Maria Castro Dominguez is the author of A Face in The Crowd which won the Erbacce Prize in 2016, and Ten Truths from Wonderland (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2020), a collaboration with Matt Duggan. She won first prize in the 2023 Plaza Poetry Prize and third prize in the Brittle Star Poetry Competition 2018. She was a finalist in the 2019 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry contest, and was highly commended in the Borderlines Poetry Competition 2020. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals such as Apogee, The Long-Islander Huntington Journal NY, Popshot, PANK, Empty Mirror, The Chattahoochee Review and The Cortland Review.

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