Poetry post
For Olive
My love, we are falling among the stars.
Tumbling eternally through time and space,
Swept up in a ceaseless river of darkness,
The soft glow of fiery starlight
Creating lanterns that fleck the sky.
They look fastened into place for the moment,
Shimmering against black velvet air…
Destined to crumble apart, or fuse together,
Colliding and mingling their ancient particles.
And in all my lonely, celestial travels,
I have seen planets blossom and erode
And be swallowed whole by the blistering maw of a hungry sun,
But even a great mouth of incessant fire
Will burn right out when its time is done.
I have seen the collision of universes,
The twisting and weaving of warp and weft
Of this firm fabric, of space and time,
Of our delicate heartstrings pressed together,
Woven in and out,
Sewn and ripped apart and sewn again.
I have seen the pull of gravity –
Fragments of burning rock
Plummeting deep into the pale skin of a silver moon,
And no matter how long we drift apart,
Nothing has ever gone untouched
In this wild and cosmic soup.
The great black ocean ebbs and flows
While stars come alight with a burst of flame,
And now, swept up among whirling planets,
I have seen the dust from which they came.
And they will turn to dust again
As they topple, crumble, and crack,
And we are folded and gently unfolded
Into that ocean of black.
Where are you in the dark, my dear?
Are you lost in this infinity?
It’s awful weight comes crashing down
To press upon the finite me.
And beneath this weight I only lie,
And suffer death, but cannot die.
You disappeared into the night,
Like a candle’s flame – snuffed out. Gone.
And in the dark I stumble now,
Until the light of dawn.
I had you in my arms, my love,
I knew your warmth, your beating heart,
You were the greatest thing god ever made –
A balm for the woes of earth.
I will find you, love, and when I do,
We’ll sail along in fathomless sky
And watch the planets spin to dust
In a swirling celestial tide.
We are creatures suspended in darkness,
We are swept up in the dance of time,
We are tumbling ever downward
Past every point of light.
These constellations, they are vast,
I know not where they end,
But as we sail through the terrible dark
I’ll reach for you, my friend.
And together, you and I,
We’ll hold each other close
We’ll drift through the sky like a glittering star,
And we may never Land again,
But
The galaxy is ours.