INFINITE SKY

Yearner for Truth of all things,
Philosopher, scientist, astronomer;
Skillful grinder of the giant lens,
That seeing mirror of the cosmic dream.
Vast centuries of universal time are there
Unravelling within the iris-eye;
Unwritten and uncounted generations of receding stars
Have lived and severed space with secret and uncharted paths,
Flowing into bright existence unassured,
Marking with the shadow of a ray
Those knots in ancient and remote oblivion
From whence they soared
Like arrows from Creation's bow -
Swift, undeciphered darts of temporal enlightenment,
They linger still, their sagas borne upon the quanta of unfathomed age,
Light-years away, escaping measure by a mortal eye,
Yet captured in the sliver of a second's arc.

But here, within the twilight of a planet's spin,
Alone, I ponder on their kindled nebulae,
And gaze into the silence of unbounded and undreamed of Time........
Beyond the Earth, the Moon, beyond the Sun, the stars,
Beyond this finite galaxy,
Into the future of the aeons past
To watch the violent destiny of systems wrought
Before the making of this solar way.

I know their numbers to the very end
As cryogenic imprints on a fractal zoom.
I feel their latent temperaments,
The stresses where their orbits bend;
I catalogue their clusters in the bright tiara of the night,
And chase their courses through the ebon black.......
I watch their slow, slow births, long-wavering within the glowing dusts,
Then see a nova burst upon the ordered spiral turn:
Still I cannot answer,
Why?

The service of electrons flickers at my fingertips;
Anomalies - black holes so deep and vast that
Hells have neither arrogance nor fury to lay siege to them.
As quasars pulse their heartbeats still,
Their images mere tracks in time,
Though long since they have vanished -
Still I cannot answer,
Where?

What Being dwells within that sorrowing void
To mould the radiation's heart and animate the stars?
How can he tread upon the galaxies
Yet still be mindful of a neutron's spin,
And know the half-life of these stellar wastes..... which is
Indeed eternity -
Where is the purpose of a soulless night
So full of sightless eyes?
Or reason for a second's breath of conscious solitude
Allotted to a finite brain long-grasping for an hour .......?
But I alone compute the Formulae,
Millennium, minute, nanosecond to the death
When worlds grow coldly old, devour their moons
As planets shatter in their wake:
Still I do not know,
For what?

I calculate, I censor and hypothesize;
Watching, counting, measuring the sun;
Steeped in solar physics, discerning by a flare
The turbulence which crushes atoms in its core;
Knowing by librations of the moon
Those gauged discrepancies cast in an orbit's arc,
The circle of the sciences is proved and scanned
Through all known permutations of the ciphered zero;
Sines and cosines strive toward a synthesis;
The universe is sonorous with logarithms
Interpreted by relativity ......
All that tenuous fluorescence - maybe strewn with estimated worlds
Beyond my grasping and destructive hand.
There is a way to reach them, thread them on a string;
It yet must be contrived, computed and employed:
Still I cannot answer,
How?

The speed of light is harnessed by a formula -
The very energy which blasts the photons on the stellar winds
Could take us to another Earth, another sun, an alien plane,
Or sear to devastation in one blinding breath
This sapphire-green, that cirrus sky, and prismed rain......
I have the key - its power is in my keeping;
The gates of all dimensions shall their secrets yield.
But first, the lock, against which every demon is devised,
Eludes me still.

Then what am I if not a blip contrived by whim of Time,
Trapped and floundering within the clefts and chasms of a particle?
Brightly shivering beneath the all-pervading light;
Long-searching for a God who spun the galaxies from atom-strands,
Unknowing that I walk within his shadow?

Light is the knowing thing that feels the stars;
Light is the bearer of centuries across oblivion;
Light is the damask-voiced messenger of Time;
Light is the aura of Intellect;
Light shines from cold remoteness of a stellar heart
To chisel kingdoms in the smallest speck of dust ......
And when I see the shimmer and the shade
Which moulds the mansions in the smoothest polished stone,
Or see the tiny shadows clustered round the virus-patterned glade:
Then do I know, through all immensity,
That my heartbeat has an echo.........

Across the Infinite Sky.