Comet

July 15 2017

A comet

does not streak across the sky

as one might well have imagined,

a frozen ball of ice and rock

sling-shot 'round the sun.

No, you'd see it hovering,

against the backdrop of stars

a ghostly presence at dawn.

Advancing slowly, day by day

for those who keep careful watch,

the faint glow

of a vaporized tail

speeding in its wake.

While meteors streak, satellites plod

space dust sparks and dies,

striking earth's

thin rim of air

and instantly blinking-out.

So, does anything really exist

if its death goes unlamented

it lived its life unwitnessed?

Comets dwell

in the freezing dark

in the sun's distant reaches,

and only appear every few hundred years

a generation apart.

So they are seen by virgin eyes,

history long forgotten

or not bothered to learn at all.

And expire

when they pass too close to the sun,

boiling-off into stardust

atomized to naught.

Or slip beyond

the sun's anemic pull;

orphaned

as cold black cinders

in interstellar space.

Like all portents, omens, signs of the gods

we make of this what we will,

looking up, night after night

at a comet ominously hovering.

Great events transpire

cities rise and fall,

saviours are born

tyrants die

simple folk muddle.

The affairs of men

in all their odd elliptical orbits,

whip-sawed from hellish to lost.

Comets were historically seen as portents, omens, signs. They might accompany the birth of a king, or presage some horrible downfall.

In the poem, I use this presumed confluence of celestial happenings and human events to extend the metaphor: the affairs of men mirroring the comet's erratic orbit, its ignominious deaths. Not to mention our ignorance of history, and how we are fated to repeat it. The writer, clearly, is neither saviour nor tyrant; just a simple muddler, like everyone else.

Or perhaps the writer is closer to space dust, his life blinking out unwitnessed, his existence in doubt. Because we are not solitary solipsists. We only exist in the eyes of others.