It is sunny. A few white and grey clouds move across an otherwise deep blue sky. A cool wind raises the hairs on my arms. As I receive the radio transmission, I imagine NOAA-18’s rapidly changing location. “Are you over Latvia or Lithuania? Perhaps now Belarus?” I ask. “What do you see?” The questions are not rhetorical nor do I expect a reply. I list the countries its invisible trajectory crosses: Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria. The satellite’s signal begins to stretch, its wavelength subtly lengthening as it moves away from me. “Have you crossed into Greece?” I ask. “Are you over the blackness of the Mediterranean Sea?” My line-of-sight with the NOAA-18 is unbroken as looks down on Cairo and Egypt, then, it its East, Gaza and Israel. Here, I loose its signal and my line-of-sight. Later, I look up the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, and re-read ‘Poetic Regulations’
“The stars had only one task: they taught me how to read.
They taught me I had a language in heaven
and another language on earth.
Who am I? Who am I?
I don’t want to answer yet.
May a star fall into itself, and may a forest of chestnut trees rise in the night
toward the Milky Way with me, and may it say:
Remain here!”