The Gods As They Are, On Their Planets - The Poet's Press

WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE
The photos from Hubble are unmistakable.
The light that just now reaches us
from hundreds of millions of years ago
shows one great galaxy, grand as our own
skewered by a vast invader,
another swirling spiral,
its equal with hundreds of billions of stars,
two vast ripsaws of matter and energy
flaming in perfect focus. Astronomers
slap one another’s shoulders, mark spots
where blue orbs signal the birth of stars,
as suns collide and black holes suck nebulae
into their bloated wormholes never satisfied.
I see the photographs on newsprint, two
red-orange disks the size of quarters.
Around me they scream, “The millennium is coming!
Two years until our computers won’t start!”
Those interpenetrating galaxies get less concern
than what kind of sex the President is getting.
Did no one see what these pictures really mean?
Alu marana echtho karani.
For eons, the invading disk advanced —
a thin ribbon at the peak of the heavens,
then a cloud, then, at last, the juggernaut.
For eons, the outer arms collided,
and then the burning core where stars
are numerous as grains of sand.
It will go on for eons more.
We shall all be dead, our sun expired,
before the last picture reaches here.
Does no one see the horror?
Alu marana echtho karani.
How flaming death rained down
upon the lizard men of Kra’ath?
How the peaceful Quer’hem, who spent
ten thousand years on a poem
saw all their fragile cities ruined,
how their blue limbs burned
as a great red star engulfed them?
How the lonely and ancient monks
in the basalt temples of Irlamadá
refused to leave their ancestral home
as it plunged into a methane giant?
How the great race of starmen
whose ships had spanned half a galaxy
sped from one world to another —
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