Yearning for the Universe- A Space Poem
Wants and whatnot
What do I want in this vastness?
A trillion trillion planets and then there’s Earth
The only known observatory
Across the hundred billion galaxies
They showed me a lot of things
The rings of Saturn, the lakes of Titan
The depths in the craters, the darkness of matter
The panoramas of Hubble, the rocks of the Moon
They showed me incredible things
The petals of flowers of exotic colors
The beauty of life and star-crossed lovers
The shades of starlight in our exosphere
They showed me things out of the world
The birth cries of a black hole
The ripples of space-time
The world view at the speed of light
They showed me everything they could
The biosphere of an exoplanet
The stellar flares of a distant star
The eclipse of a neutron across an atom
Then they asked, what I want
I could choose anything
And it would be mine
What do I want? I wondered
And then I got my answer
Not the microcosm of the Universe
But the Universe itself
Every shade, every storm, every speck within
All of its limits, in its entirety
Little did I know
The Universe was a part of me
A part of me I couldn’t see
Little did I know
That by choosing myself
I chose the Universe in its whole
A few lines inspired/triggered by a random conversation and a space-themed poem by the 2020 Noble Laureate in literature, Louise Glück.
