Tag: Black hole

You can’t hear screams in space -- but they are there, in abundance.
I look at the horizon:
The distant hills are covered with trees and shrubs, and grasses.
The fronds on nearby palm trees sway gently in the warm breeze.
I see a small pond with lilies and reeds and even pond scum,
And I feel good, alive and strong and even essential, significant.

I listen to the sound of a Black Hole.
It is a hiss with modulation, but it is somehow ominous -- deadly,
Atavistic, I’ve heard it before.
I look at the pictures from the Webb telescope.
They are gorgeous, incredible, brilliant, unimaginable.
They take me back to the beginning of time.
The stars and galaxies and nebulae are lacy and soft,
Like a necklace or a lovely ball gown designed to enhance natural beauty.

I re-enter my world. Twenty miles deep air protects me, guards me, gives me freedom.
I feel the heat from the sun -- 93 million miles away; it is vital and terrifying.
I look at the photos from the telescope again, and it is beautiful-deadly.
I can’t escape the chilling reality that I can only be here as long as the pond is filled with water,
The sky is filled with air, and the vicious world outside my earth is kept at bay.
I can’t get close to the stars, the vast dust clouds that are birthing stars.
And I can’t get them out of my mind – I want to play among the stars.
I feel a chill of impending doom, but I don’t know where it comes from.

It is the voice of space, of the Webb. 
The hiss of a Black Hole,
The echo of the Big Bang, 
The beat of the spinning pulsar
It is clean and crisp,
Dark and muddied.
This is the voice of our parents.
This is the sound of our death.