Ron Russel, Lumen Space II, July 1991, oil, acrylic, and lacquer on glass, 18” X 24”, gift of David and Lynn Grisham.

New Mexico Museum of Space History (Alamogordo, NM).

Youth Category Winner

"A Letter to My Space Man" by Marley Launer 

Space man, 

Lost in blues and browns and golds

Tell me, 

Do you ever look out and see nothing?

No planets eagerly awaiting your solemn footstep?

No stars waiting to whisper the secrets of the universe in your ear?

Infinite amounts of stars sparkling and shining

Just for you

Like eyes

All on you

Awaiting your answer

 

Space man, 

When you yell and demand for a return to your home, 

Tell me, 

What do you fear more:

The echo of your voice

Spinning in circles and back to you?

Or the answer, 

A cold-blooded hiss?

 

Space man, 

When you look out at the streaks and spots

Nebulas and moons

Spots and patterns of pinks and blues

Tell me, 

Does the beauty of it all wrap itseld around you like a warm hug?

Does it stroke your hair and rub your back the way people on earth never did?

 

Space man, 

Tell me, 

If given the chance, 

Would you come back home?

 

Adult Category Winner

"Lumen Space II" by Rebecca Aronson

Say we are inside a ventricle, floating

loose in a cell's shining universe among filaments

 

which undulate like seagrass, threads of light

entangling the starry pin-pricks that speckle

 

the vast ceiling, where constellations

knit themselves to other glittering clusters, forming

 

eventually a patchwork, resplendent tissue:

inside a body the moment the breath goes quiet

 

as if a dimmer switch turned slowly down.

I've watched such failing, watched

 

as lungs ceased propulsion, heart falling still

as the butterfly I once caught, whose trembling wings pulsed

 

a steady scissor-beat until they stopped.

I imagined a hush spreading inside my father's cells, 

 

the delicate, luminous, crisscross wires

disintegrating, released to swing free

 

until an unseeable snow tamped into nothing

the system's murmuring, 

 

and afterwards those thousand tiny lights I'd never noticed

before they guttered out.

 

What we miss with our poor eyes

is nearly everything, though even a child's microscope

 

or a telescope image from the internet will show a glimpse, 

an eyeful of that many-colored flower whose edges churn ever outward

 

or inward, whose ragged, shifting pedals

keep revealing another layer beyond what we guessed was there.