Seeing Stars on the Poetry Bus

Two Poems (and a "haiku")
1

We must be humble,we
who are so easily confused
by mere appearances, he said.
But he was looking at cold stones,
eulogising them as peers of stars.
So what if he had looked at stars,
would he have likened them
to stones? Or seen instead
the point at which a formless cloud
of dust and gas achieves its destiny,
evolves a structure to become a star?
Might he have seen from where
and how the structure comes?
Would he have shared all that with us -
or can it not be caught in words?

If only that were possible
he would have taught us how to fly
wing tip to wing tip with our god -
whoever that may be.
(whoever he may be, he must
explain the stars and me.)

Might we have: seen the cloud
reach critical, its inner core
expanding, slowly for a while,
then exponentially;
seen how it grew denser; felt
the growing heat;
seen the core explode
in energy releasing
nuclear reactions;
seen it turning luminous, become
the new kid on the block?

I think he would have shown us then
a massive star, its short life over,
decaying to a supernovae,
forming a black hole.

Once, stars were pinpricks in the firmament
(My granddad told me that.)
through which the light of heaven shone
to reassure the earth.

How sad to think the only holes
are made by ex-stars now -
and so are dark and threatening,
potential spanners in
the universal works.

---

2

When I was very young
a lamplighter came round
to light my star, the lamp
outside our house.

I asked him once
who lit the lamps
in those long lines
across the sky.

That always puzzled me -
although I never wondered
much about the sun
and who lit that.

He said I was too young
to understand such things,
that I should ask my teacher -
in a year or two.

I thought he was a star -
he played with gas and fire -
before I knew
that stars were gas and fire.

So I had two -
one fixed,
one wandering -
both mine!

---

Haiku

their micro gismo
displays two states at one time -
proving Einstein right