Sympathy for Pluto: three poems by Matthew Pullar
Warp
“Don't let it faze you, kid. I've fallen into my share of black holes too...”
~ Patrick Modiano, Afterimage
Nothing goes on beyond the event horizon—
or everything does. Movies have made
magic portals out of wormholes, plunging
across timespace with an impossibly dense,
matter-crunching swoop. But even
the smartest among us can only guess
how time and space warp beyond the infinite
pressing gravity. No wormholes, the scientists say.
But what in their place? No cosmic vacuums either,
no nearby matter sucked inside. Only
a boundary, and then—all that we know of light,
of space and time collapsed into who-knows-what.
Some days I feel their pull, though I know
they cannot catch me. If given the chance, I’d fly
1500 light years to reach the nearest one and plunge
right through its glowing eye, stretched out
infinitely, spaghetti-like, stringing self past
the boundaries of all knowledge and observation,
deep deep into the impenetrable heart.
Though I doubt I’d stand the course, being more
bluster than bravery when it comes to such things.
Yet nights came as a child, come sometimes still,
when my sleeplessness closed around me,
thick, dense, warping the vacuum of my room,
and I glimpsed then something like scientists guess.
Something, perhaps, like Simone Weil had in mind
envisaging Christ’s nails piercing through space
to the Universe’s very crucified core,
the veil split through, and in that thick dark
the soul caught, nail-driven, riven, to God.
Must I always enter the fearsome wastes of the night
to find that thick darkness where often You are?
Or can I catch—like a gleeful astronaut—the grace
that glides on Your horizon,
infinite in substance, piercing through space?
(Previously published on Scripture Union)
*
Sympathy for Pluto
Though you circle the Sun only once in three centuries,
it took less than eighty years to demote you.
Labelled “eccentric,” your orbit disqualified you,
and though satellites gathered round you, only
the stalwart still call you a planet.
A whole word redefined to account for
the many new icy worlds like you at the solar system’s edge.
Now you’re a “dwarf,” no longer the long-awaited ninth of the set,
the answer to the algebra of “Planet X.”
Surely you watch in sadness now
as astronomers scan the Kuiper Belt
in infrared to find the final
planet they’re convinced lies there, hidden from light.
Named in courtesy, the last of Saturn’s children,
you also carried the stigma of one dwelling in darkness,
likely to kidnap a niece, power hungry, socially inept.
All the assumptions we make of the eccentric, the slow.
Holst wrote no movement for you. Removed now
from children’s solar system mobiles, no one
notices the absence. But know this, Pluto:
whatever fleet-footed Mercury might claim,
the race is not to the swift, and the largest—listen,
Jupiter—do not hold greater claim to the creator’s eye.
However slowly, wonkily you make your
two-and-a-half centuries’ orbit, there is enough
warmth in your Maker’s heart for all
the eccentric and forgotten. Nothing too small.
*
After "Sonnet 129"
(A “blacked-out” poem in which the last word of each line from Shakespeare’s
original "Sonnet 129" is used as the first word for each line of the new poem.)
Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame dominates when you think of
Is lust in action; and till action, lust, that catch-all phrase, tarred with fear and
Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame, hurled at the male brain, at women’s flesh.
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust the rules though they cannot make
Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight your path to the narrow, gracious gate. They
Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had you at “pure,” lured you with pious-making
Past reason hated as a swallowed bait. Wish you’d known that Christ won’t drive you
On purpose laid to make the taker mad, nor excuse the dark you fear, but transform it
Mad in pursuit and in possession so shame implodes into light. Wish you’d known this
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme way of grace, wish you’d been spared such
A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe; but still, love wings its steady way to you beyond this
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream. No darkness will trap you. All shall be
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well. All manner of thing shall be well and
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell has no hold. No black hole can keep you in.
_________________________
Matthew Pullar is a poet and teacher based in Melbourne, Australia. He has been published in places like Amethyst Review, Heart of Flesh, Ekstasis, and Fare Forward. His latest collection, This Teeming Mess of Glory (Wipf & Stock, 2025), was shortlisted for Australian Christian Book of the Year. His socials are @matthew.pullar on Instagram and Threads, and he also writes at his website, mpullar.com.
(August 2026 issue)
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