The Death of a Star

Whales have to believe in something;

the refuge of faith ever more persuasive,

when as a group, you find you're in decline,

and in nightly gazes heavenward, 

their gigantic masses break the surface

of an ocean to see the silvered orbs nictate,

guessing that they must be the eyes

of a thousand other whales fluttering

back at them from another distant deep. 
 

And these visions feed the fire of their doctrines,

fuel the motion of each elephantine anatomy:

a blue whale's heart, for instance,

is enormous, gallons of blood impelled

on the necessity of just a slow beat 

to follow these flickered lights

before they are engulfed by sunrise. 

Whales do not understand that stars will shine 

only for as long they have hydrogen to burn,

until a black hole draws them into its void - 

it is as if they had never existed at all. 
 

So when a whale feels the cold, gravitational waves

released across space, and time is punctured 

with dark markers of new equations - 

it is again the long sigh of an angry god 

to a whale: the kind of audible groan that gave birth

to the first humans -  a whale surmises,

though what they ever did to warrant such a punishment,

they cannot explain, yet still, they lament it

at depth - the way the sea is always taking things

that don't belong to it, how it keeps shifting 

beneath the darkness, the watchful skies,

the psalms of thermonuclear fusion, the deaths, and

when we venture into a whale's water,

flinching, we know it. 
 

Image is from pixabay.