Wednesday 22 February 2017

a space poem

In the silence, a voice – the unheard sound
a ship’s rockets create as they cry out
against the void. In the vacuum, a wind,
like fingers trailing down a spine, shifts
from star to star, touches the point
where dreams become and thoughts –
the eddy of  time – flow back and forth, pool
in the emptiness of comparisons; really
is any star better than the previous, greater
than the nova or less than the yellow sun’s
emerging experience of the night?

And in this darkness we travel around and around
and through, a line without intention voyaging
to places so distant that by the time we reach them
the reasons no longer matter, like how a starman
can hold a child, a daughter, say, tiny legs kicking,
and, with all the promises whispered
into the powerful scent of that  newborn crown,
still be shocked when she leaves home…
as if the years were but short breaths
between the joys and errors of life, and the starman
finds himself in the spaceship, his face pressed
against the small porthole watching
his daughter, like a bright blue planet, fading
into the diminishing distance of existence.

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