As we are and were

Propeller Nebula by Géza Kurczveil, June 2011
(For original unedited photo, please click on Star-Géza
photostream link under Vision in right margin below).

The Small Hands We Leave

Imagine pointing a small box at the night sky,
sitting with it a while, charming the black snakes
out, tending to it as if a million bright eggs were
slowly boiling inside, pulling deep light from the
dark places between the worlds, a frothy quasma
leaking milk across an inky terrain, the fireflush
of membranic ridges laced at the edge of a great
swan breaking laval against unwitnessable shores
through drowsy veins of starwaves, one after another.

These are the places there are and were, as we
are and were among them. Observe this and know
that little of what we do here ever matters beyond
the time in which we do it. Eating, drinking, making,
being—runaltogether in unweavable materials made
of nothing more than mere remembrance. Thus, we
do so anyway for to tend to the great structures of the
stars yet impends before us only when we are done
with this world, the small hands we leave to a sandbox.

Joseph Gallo
June 19, 2011


Special thanks to Géza Kurczveil for use of his photograph &
video and whose stellar astrography inspired the poem above.
(Added music by the late great composer, John Barry from Dances With Wolves).