When man lights the land The stars go out - Our punctured canopy Falls like a shroud Buried beneath blue-bright, Starlinked light. Our longing for guidance At this holy time Is blinded by sharp shadows And spilling streams. Our blind night, Where sky-grief And gentle apricity, Become nostalgia. Cups and rings Carved on the land By weary travellers Are hollow symbols.
Our journey Over the starlit sea Is lost. Suzanne Fairless-Aitken Aparna Venkatesan, a cosmologist at the University of San Francisco, and John Barentine, astronomer and science communicator at Dark Sky Consulting, have coined a new term to help focus efforts to light pollution. Their term, as reported in a brief paper in the preprint database arXiv and in an e-Letter to the journal Science, is "noctalgia." In general, it means "sky grief," and it captures the collective pain we are experiencing as we continue to lose access to the night sky.
