Wednesday, August 10, 2022

Black Holes and Poetry

Words and syllables leech into the universe
through the event horizon spinning in my brain,
a point with no location or mass, no Newtonian coordinates.

The lines come from a muse hiding in an alternate reality,
a poet squared uttering images into a wormhole,
ideas to be translated by a tongue wagging in the Milky Way.

A man and a woman walk along a shaded path
before making love in a sun-dappled green field.
A steady rain washes them like quicksilver into the next stanza,

where they exchange letters, each writing on a different continent
because of infidelity, duty, war, or an uncommon plague.
A man eating a vendor’s pretzel stands on a New York street corner.

He once owned a sunny field where he found two lovers,
naked and alone and kissing after walking along a shaded path.
He has just left his employ—stamping postmarks on letters

written by a man in New York and a woman in Rome.
The content of these missives from the heart remains a mystery,
for in that other world, where the higher poet lives,

the quantum bard has taken a break to eat tea and toast and jam.
I am a humble scribe fencing pictures from the pregnant void,
but today I dare to disturb a universe poised on the edge of a daffodil.

The man and the woman reunite and once again make love,
and it is their child who has taken the time to write this poem.

~William Hammett


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