Poems by Lucille Lang Day

Reading the Science News, Thinking of Love
 
The female Egyptian cotton leafworm,
a moth, listens for ultrasonic clicks
of tomato plants in distress,
then lays her eggs on silent ones.
 
Does she know what she’s doing?
Smaller than a pinhead, a moth’s brain
contains more than one million neurons.
With 86 billion, do humans steer clear of crying?
 
Raised in captivity, at age 18 months
Boris and Svetlaya, Siberian tigers,
were released 120 miles apart. It took Boris more
than a year to walk those miles in a straight line
 
through tundra and taiga to reach her.
Six months later, she had a litter of cubs.
How did Boris know where she was?
What drove him to find her?
 
Surfing the sun’s corona, the Parker
Solar Probe surpassed 430,000 miles per hour,
breaking its own record as the fastest object
ever made by humans and enduring
 
a temperature of 2,000 degrees,
to find what accelerates solar wind.
What are our own limits? How close
can we come? At what speed?
 
 
 
Things I Almost Forgot
 
The gray sequined evening gown
I never wore
and the silver shoes,
crinkly gray jacket
and necklace
shining with many colors
I bought to wear with it.
 
That delta means change,
a triangle to signify
variation, such as
a new velocity; and that
excited protons and neutrons
are delta baryons, each
with three up or down quarks.
 
That even Heraclitus knew
in 500 BCE that the only
constant is change:
we forget and remember,
a volcano erupts,
camelias bloom,
night turns into day.
 
The importance of touch— 
fingers interlocked,
legs entwined,
the taste of lips not my own— 
and remembering
the dress, then trying it on
in time’s wild flow.
 
 

Lucille Lang Day is the author of four poetry chapbooks and seven full-length collections, most recently Birds of San Pancho and Becoming an Ancestor. The Cosmos and Me: New and Selected Poems will be published by Trio House Press in 2026. She has also edited three poetry anthologies and published two children’s books and a memoir. Her poems have appeared in more than 200 publications, and her many honors include the Blue Light Poetry Prize, two PEN Oakland – Josephine Miles Literary Awards, the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, and eleven Pushcart Prize nominations. She runs a small press, Scarlet Tanager Books.

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