POETRY JAM - LOOKING BACK

“Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move. Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love.” - William Shakespeare

This week Poetry Jam sets as a challenge the following theme: “This week go back to a year in the past and write a poem about your life or life in general at that time.”

Halley’s Comet is a short-period comet visible from Earth every 75–76 years. Halley is the only short-period comet that is clearly visible to the naked eye from Earth, and the only naked-eye comet that might appear twice in a human lifetime. Halley last appeared in the inner Solar System in 1986 and will next appear in mid-2061. Halley’s returns to the inner Solar System have been observed and recorded by astronomers since at least 240 BC. Clear records of the comet’s appearances were made by Chinese, Babylonian, and medieval European chroniclers, but were not recognised as reappearances of the same object at the time.

Here is my poem duet:

1986: Night of the Comet, I

And then tonight
Was the night of the comet.
Clear sky spattered with stars
And in the midst of astral dust
Of star-strewn chaotic order,
A faint, fuzzy, ill-defined light
Lost in all the others.

“Search and ye shall find!”
The night crisp, cold, pungent
And beside me...
“Ask and ye shall receive...”

Have I found you?
Faint, pale and ill-defined
A light amidst a billion others,
Yet only that one mattering;
Like that once in a lifetime glimpsed at,
Faint, pale and ill-defined,
Comet-light...

1986: Night of the Comet, II

Billions upon billions of suns
Strewn through the endless emptiness
Of the cosmos,
I look at them and yet remain indifferent
To the immensity that stares at me,
Being able to contain it all
Within the low walls and ceiling
Holding my brain.

I love...
I love you and that is more important
Than the speed of light within a vacuum.
What should it matter if now a million suns
Should suddenly decide to supernova?
What if I am but a mite on a speck of dust?
It is enough that I have loved,
Nothing can take that from me.

I feel, I love, I understand,
I am small, insignificant, an atom only
In the endlessness of eternity
And yet I love and I can pinpoint my existence
In unfaltering co-ordinates.

What if the earth should suddenly expire?
What if Death around each corner lies in wait?
My only fear now is that we two are on a parallel course
And that the threads of our two lives will never cross...

That which I feel
Is infinitely more important
Than all the vastness looming above,
Below, on all sides of me.
The space within me
Annuls the space without.