Cosmic Reliquary

COSMIC RELIQARY

 

Dancers, dancing, in crystalline amber,

Fighting the flow of molecular stasis;

Eight thousand, ten thousand, years in making

Their ritual, primitive, delicate paces.

 

Swimmers, swimming, through old slow stone,

Beating their fins in the bubbling rock;

Ten million, twelve million, years in cresting,

Sedimentary waves in limestone blocks.

 

Old light, streaming, down from creation,

Great galaxies beaming through chasms of years;

Two billion, three billion, light years in coming

From stars that, perhaps, are no longer here.

Another one of my elderly poems, pressed into the front lines in what feels to be the waning years of the war. The conceit is, of course, the the universe around us is a museum of relics of work unguessed. Never could quite come up with a satisfactory final line.