Bad Year for Astronauts

January when the Apollo mission
on a plugs-out launch pad test
hampered by a pressurized hatch
suffered the flash fire that asphyxiated
Grissom and Chaffee and White
our first walker in space

April when the wretched Soyuz 1 craft
inspected and found wanting by Gargarin
in that ignored memo to the KGB
started flaring through re-entry
parachutes useless
taking Vladmir Komarov on a wild ride
that he’d already predicted as final
his voice cursing through a blaze of static
before his bones went molten
flesh gone carbon

for some it’s a month of tomato-decimating blight
for others a season of shifting tectonic plates
for Australians it’s another year without rain
for astronauts it’s 1967









Robert Frazier is the author of eight books of poetry and a three-time winner of the Rhysling Award for poetry. His previous collections include Co-Orbital Moons, Perception Barriers, and The Daily Chernobyl. His poem “A Crash Course in Lemon Physics” (2002) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He was honored with the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Grand Master designation in 2005. He is curator of exhibitions for the Artists Association of Nantucket, and he shows his oil paintings at Old Spouter Gallery and Nantucket Looms.