We must insist we never saw this photograph
even if we tell ourselves it is not real.

Having seen it sears our psyches with the thought
that absolutely nothing holds Earth up.
– – – –

We fall at speeds we cannot comprehend.
We circumnavigate the Earth while standing still
as it rotates at one thousand miles per hour.

Even that swift dash seems manageable compared
to how fast our Earth Rock gyres around the sun
on its eight-light-minutes leash: a thousand times
faster than our cars roll down our highways.

– – – – –
Thinking of ‘Pale Blue Dot’ — the photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 space probe from a distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles, 40.5 AU), and of what Carl Sagan said about it.