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Jan 2024
There’s something astounding
About our place here,
standing on a planet
circling a burning furnace
full of hydrogen atoms colliding
and fusing and slowly eating itself alive,
flaming into the light and heat and
imposition of a life giving god
casting countenance through the emptiness
and unfathomable distances of outer space
Until the day it decides it’s tired
of all the effort it takes
to scream into the void for all time
and hold the cycle steady
so that something it’s never touched
can “count their days” and keep a schedule
based on dividing entropy
arbitrarily
into increasingly small divisions
like eons and epochs and eras,
then to centuries, decades, years,
Months and days,
down to hours and minutes and seconds, and eventually atomic rates of decay
so small and short and fleeting and transient
as to be inconsequential for them to be named.

It is the only star you see during day,
And when it hides away it’s shine
A vast dark void reveals its presence
Just behind the painted skies she illuminates with radiation from the chaotic energy that shattered atoms release and reverberate and it reflects and refracts and reveals the presence of the heavy elements it made that coalesced into small collections of elemental ***** spinning and floating and collapsing in upon themselves under minuscule but compounded atomic weight

And in its blanket black indifference
little signs of somethings distant and gigantic and ancient shine through the darkest reaches of infinite shadow and silent solitude

5000 years ago our ancestors took a rudimentary set of lines and scribbled simple symbols on the nocturnal symphony because they realized the points of light passed through the same part of the night at a given time, and If you knew which specks were in what patch of sky you could figure out how to navigate great distances because the heavens are ever wide and the same sky flies over every place, and no matter how far you had wandered into the wilderness or how far off course you’d floated away, you could always find a way back home, no path necessary, from any place where you had found yourself, whether you’d been trying desperately to find some sort of peace of mind of any kind, or simply running from some thing terrible or even menial, it’s all the same.

But moving south
Across the equatorial belt
Into the southern hemisphere
Sailing west away from land
Dancing north toward the horizon line
The heavens shift in subtle
Variations so the stars you might expect to find are in a completely different orientation that cannot easily be aligned
But you can always seek out the belt and dagger of the Titan Hunter of the sky. And it might confuse you as to why he seems to be there upside down or on his side. But do not worry you have not lost your bearing it’s simply a matter of of perspective from the angle which you find yourself considering your local night

And a flat earth theory
would try to have you believe
that there’s no such thing
as an equatorial divide,
but the fact that
Orion Cartwheels
across the horizon
from the southern side,
while from the north,
he takes a strolling path
across the southern horizon line,
and that he never changes
his permanent position directly
in the summer spring fall or winter sky
tells you something is out there,
further than we can fathom,
and somewhere even farther:
the beginning of time.
T R Wingfield
Written by
T R Wingfield  41/M/Deep in the Heart'o'Dixie
(41/M/Deep in the Heart'o'Dixie)   
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