No Standing Still - Aug 10 2024

 

No Standing Still

Aug 10 2024

Once again, the days get shorter.

People come and go.

Things are found and lost

and found again,

or lost and then forgotten.

So it can be hard to tell

if time moves in one direction

or elastically back and forth.

Inexorably forward,

or stretching and rebounding

so things come round again.

But either way

there is no standing still.

So every morning

when you look in the mirror

and don’t seem any older

you know it can’t be so.

Just as every season’s different.

Just as history doesn’t repeat.

And just as there’s no going back

living life out of sync

undoing the past.

But with shorter days come longer nights.

The replenishing darkness,

when your eyes open wide

to take in the world

and time seems to slow.

When, far from artificial light

a man looks up

at a cloudless sky

and sees more stars

than he ever imagined.

All of them

travelling outward

faster and faster,

receding

until even at the speed of light

their shine can't catch up.

So in the fullness of time

when another man looks up

all he will see is empty sky,

an infinity

of unbroken blackness

without a single star.

We may believe

that there is no other life in the universe,

but he will think

there is only earth.

And that it's always been so;

a solitary planet

enclosed in a cold black void

alone in the universe.

A rumination on the arrow of time.

It has not only been observed that the universe is expanding, but that the rate of expansion is — instead of constant — increasing with time. Which is why it was theorised there must be some unknown force at play that more than overcomes gravity. They called this “dark energy”: "dark", because we have no idea what it is.

So in the fullness of time, the universe will be a dark cold place, where all matter -- down to the most elemental particle -- will be spread infinitely thin.

(This poem is being posted out of chronological order because it was lost for over a month, and only recently recovered.)