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A Gathering of Poetry | February 2026

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night sky with planetary notations by NASA

In the last weeks of February, those with a cloudless night and an observant eye (possibly aided by a telescope) can experience a “planetary parade.”  A six-planet alignment will be visible in the early evening. 

See what you can discover with NASA’s directional assistance:  “In mid-February, Saturn will drop to the horizon as Venus and Mercury climb, meeting in the west to southwest sky.  Jupiter will be high in the sky.  Uranus will be found in the southern sky and Neptune will be found near Saturn.”

In honor of this celestial phenomenon, here is a poem by Sara Teasdale for this month’s Gathering of Poetry.

February Twilight 

I stood beside a hill
Smooth with new-laid snow,
A single star looked out
From the cold evening glow.

There was no other creature
That saw what I could see—
I stood and watched the evening star
As long as it watched me.

Graphic credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Bibliographic credit: In the public domain, this poem was first published in Poetry Magazine, 1924

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Gathering of Poetry | December 2024

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blue sky with an elliptic figure-8 in the background with standing stones in the foreground

Mid-December and we have only a light dusting of snow, nothing like the hip-high drifts of my childhood. For this third Thursday Gathering of Poetry, I will celebrate a winter trio: snow (not yet fallen), winter solstice, and Nikki Giovanni’s Winter Poem.

once a snowflake fell
on my brow and i loved
it so much and i kissed
it and it was happy and called its cousins
and brothers and a web
of snow engulfed me then
i reached to love them all
and i squeezed them and they became
a spring rain and i stood perfectly
still and was a flower

Bibliographic credit: Giovanni, Nikki. The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni: 1968-1998. © Harper Perennial, 2007.

Photo and graphic credit: Analemma over the Callanish Stones, © Giuseppe Petricca.

NASA technical description: An analemma is a composite image taken from the same spot at the same time over the course of a year. The tilt of the Earth axis and the ellipticity of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun create the analemma’s figure-8 shape. At the solstices, the Sun will appear at the top or bottom of an analemma. The featured image was taken near the December solstice 2022 at the Callanish Stones, near the village of Callanish in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland, UK. Source: NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day