The poem describes the daily life of a woman who survived typhoid fever as a child but was left stooped and unable to marry as a result. Though her mother resents her for surviving, she finds joy and escape in astronomy, imagining walking among the constellations and planets and learning about celestial bodies from articles her brother sends her. She sings to herself about the night sky to cope with her difficult life and unforgiving mother.
The poem describes the daily life of a woman who survived typhoid fever as a child but was left stooped and unable to marry as a result. Though her mother resents her for surviving, she finds joy and escape in astronomy, imagining walking among the constellations and planets and learning about celestial bodies from articles her brother sends her. She sings to herself about the night sky to cope with her difficult life and unforgiving mother.
The poem describes the daily life of a woman who survived typhoid fever as a child but was left stooped and unable to marry as a result. Though her mother resents her for surviving, she finds joy and escape in astronomy, imagining walking among the constellations and planets and learning about celestial bodies from articles her brother sends her. She sings to herself about the night sky to cope with her difficult life and unforgiving mother.
The poem describes the daily life of a woman who survived typhoid fever as a child but was left stooped and unable to marry as a result. Though her mother resents her for surviving, she finds joy and escape in astronomy, imagining walking among the constellations and planets and learning about celestial bodies from articles her brother sends her. She sings to herself about the night sky to cope with her difficult life and unforgiving mother.
In 1828 the Royal Astronomical Society awarded a gold medal to Caroline Herschel. No woman would receive one again for 168 years.
My mother cant forgive me for being alive.
The typhoid made me stooped, legs short, never to be wed, but my hands are quick, my voice strong, and I look up as I walk icy streets I may trip over frozen excrement or sighing heaps of rags but I remember my brothers hand in mine as he said, look at the planets, thats Jupiter, and theres Mars, there among those constellations. I imagine walking with the Seven Sisters, their bright cold hands, meeting Orion, his gruff laugh, his belt looped around my waist. All fancy, of course my mother says I read too many books but I cant resist the articles my brother sends, solar winds and stars, telescopes, the geography of Mars. I dream them, though I dont sleep much: at five I pull myself from warmth to break flinty ice on the water buckets, begin bread, wake my mother with hot milk. She pinches me. I wont squeak she likes it when I do. Instead I begin my piece-work, each stitch made with raw fingers, rubbed stiff. Im paying her back for my illness, the days I spent in bed, the man I cannot wed, the woman I cannot be. My mother wont forgive me for being alive, but I sing to myself, my clear soprano, I put celestial distances to familiar tunes, whisper names of Martian canals, of Jupiters moons. In my head the whole scope of the sky.