Far up above me, the infinite expanse.
Distant suns reel in a timeless dance.
Clustered and drawn to the galactic heart
Seething nuclear cauldrons are mere candles against the dark.
Orbiting these sparks on worlds familiar, yet strange
Dwell biological musings of a god deranged.
From these sparkling jewels that sunder the night,
How long has travelled, their light to my sight?
And when the rays first erupted from these far off spheres,
who looked up, like me, in wonder and fear?
Maybe my father, or his father before?
Or further back still, through myth and folklore.
Babylon, it is said, was raised from the mud.
Fertile loam between rivers made bricks, mixed with blood.
Thieves and merchants, warriors and whores.
Lived and loved in a world familiar to yours.
Or Assyria. Conquerors. Fierce and proud.
To Niniveh, their city, they dragged the enslaved and the cowed.
Yet defeated, Niniveh, once clad in marble and gold
Its crowns and treasures broken and sold.
Its proud walls now ruins and buried in sand.
Its terror a mythic memory in an ancient land.
I feel a connection with those gone before,
looking up at the darkness in wonder and awe.
For fashioned from dust are we and those past.
Dust exuded before time from primal dead stars.
At the worlds eastern edge an excitement has begun.
And rising. Majestic. Our life giving sun.
Gathering its power, a circle of gold.
Making day anew from a night that was old.
Yet one day, long hence, its fuel will be spent.
Reddening and angry the skies will be rent.
The oceans will boil, the earth melted to glass.
The world consumed as Sol gives its last gasp.
Shedding its body to the vast vacuum of space.
No memory. No ruins. No sign of our race.
Yet maybe, separated by distance and time,
other beings will be moulded from the dust that was mine.