Spinning into Space

Remember childhood revolution,
both arms outstretched, the world condensed,
a spinning top, you dare look up,
until the world tips on its axis.

Both arms outstretched, the world condensed,
it feels the same as our first kiss,
a brush of lips that made us glow
like fireworks in an autumn sky.

A spinning top, you dare look up,
my chilly hand enclosed in yours.
We made our way up the beach road,
our heads tipped back to see the stars.

Until the world tips on its axis,
the sequinned constellations tack
across the sky; they will spin us
into outer space again.

Kim M. Russell, 12^th November 2026

It’s Thursday and at the dVerse Poets Pub we are returning to fours to meet the bar with Laura.

She begins her prompt with a lovely quote from Alfred Lord Tennyson and goes on to write about the earth’s seasons and the annual patterning of the night sky, with Taurus now dominating the Northern hemisphere sky and the peak of the Northern Taurid meteor shower. Laura says that “occasionally this cosmic debris enters our atmosphere and remains, as illustrated by C. S. Lewis’ ‘The Meteorite’” and Jeffrey Angle’s ‘The Usage of Returns’.

For today’s prompt we too are returning to a French poetry form but one we have not had before on dVerse. It’s very similar to the more familiar Quatern but for today we are focusing on The Retourne, which consists of 16 lines made up of 4 quatrains; 8 syllables per line; a tumbling refrain using the last 3 lines of the first stanza; and it is unrhymed.

I returned to an old poem from 2020 with a spacy theme and reworked it into a Retourne.