On the vividly tattooed surfaces
Of the planets too far away for us to see
And too beautiful for us to imagine
There can almost certainly be found water and oxygen and carbon and every one of the 118 elements we’ve decided to classify our surroundings by

Thousands of years in lights journey
will be spanned
and inevitably we will find all of this new water
and new oxygen
and new life
And then perhaps we will realize that we were looking for an element
that can’t be put on a table
or looked for in the stars
Mostly, though, I hope that on that day we will not learn that we expedited ourselves into the sky and learned to settle with being completely alone