Sestina

Abyss.  A nanosecond’s blazing light,

The herald to a straining fecund mass

Unleashed.  A tongue of blinding, whippèd flame

Sears all before, while bearing all we’ll know;

Its megallanic stream expands to form

A Universe of fire.  One second’s past—

Matter explodes.  Growth’s spiraling has passed

The comprehendable.  A lash of light

That forges, through its surge, the casts of forms—

Icons for us—of weighed and measured mass

Ten billion years from this.  Yet few’ll then know,

Or knowing grasp, those glaciers of flame.

To measure scale for such a furious flame? 

Dark Matter reels.  Imagine it just passed,

Expanding in a bubble that you know

Soaped Titan in his bath.  He loved the light

Refracted—'til it burst—became a mass

Of scum.  For us, lost Space and Earth and form.

Within our bubble, Hubble shows the forms

Of roiling supernovae; helium flame

From Alpha Caeli’s rim; the Pleiad mass

Of gas and dust that veils, then flickers past

A Milky Way of twinkling roseate light—

Shape-shifting, whispers ‘there is more to know’.

Imprisoned in this cauldron we must know

How miniscule we are, before we form

Idea that we have any power to light

One candle’s guttering sickly flame

And peer.  Myopic view, fragmented past

And impotent.  Neutrino looks on Mass.

So was the project worth it?  Should we mass-

Protest the by-pass if the Vogons know

The earth is mostly harmless, with a past

Of telephonic hygiene?  It never forms

Intelligence, to burn a gem-like flame.

If you are last to leave, put out the light.

We studied mass, created form,

And looked for no eternal flame.

Just passed on far more heat than light.