Out there, in here

 

The sun does not move, we wrongly think.
Our eyes just show us what we wish.

We know the Earth rolls around it, though,
Tilted this way and that;
The days and months, the seasons, we’ve been taught,
Are the proofs of something we are too limited to see.

We feel the invisible attraction of rock and dirt
From the instant of conception.
Sperm and egg swim and dance in the grip of gravity.
We never know anything else.

Yet we please ourselves to believe that
Our world is one solid thing, unchangeable,
When in truth, we’re bound with atomic chains
to a whirling ball of temporary matter, itself
Caught in the invisible embrace of vast, eternal destruction,
Pulling, pulling, pulling against the death song of
A black hole  of cosmic suck, built to twist time itself
at unimaginable distances, but all-powerful.
And most of what we’ve thought for 10,000 years or more
Is no better than a child’s bedtime story.

Lord, what fools we mortals be.

As the Earth rolls around—half a face always bathed in the the furnace of judgement—
The dark half peers into the infinite emptiness, out where
A trillion-trillion-trillion billion stars burn, out where light grows old and dies, alone, cold.
Mindless nuclear furnaces rage in silence, balls of fusion blaze in emptiness,
Racing around ultimate darkness,
Multicolored alien majesties spread across time, on scales beyond imagining.

But we cannot see, and think this dirt beneath our feet is all permanent.
The vasty deep is, to us,
Just twinkles and glints through the haze,
More than all the grains of sand in the world, a million worlds,

Other Earths
Go rolling about their own furnaces, racing through darkness and light and ultimate cold,
Torn between capture and escape.
And among them, trillions of beings live and die, each thinking
It is the center of everything, fixed in place on
something that does not move.

Our Sun pours radiation alike on the just and the unjust, the worthy and the unworthy,
Without a care for which it nurtures and which it burns.
We, who arrived as the last link of cosmic unpredictability and take our
Turn squinting at the light that just now comes above the edge
Of our rolling world, must wonder:
What does this day require of me?