Passing Jupiter - Nov 30 2025

 

Passing Jupiter

Nov 30 2025

The embers glow

on a bed of cinder and ash

and scattered coals,

bright red

against sepulchral blacks and greys.

There’s no flame, not even smoke

as the weakening fire

burns cleanly down.

It’s like the life force ebbing away,

or at least how I hope my final battle with death

will end;

inevitably

acceptingly

going gently into the night.

 

The wrought iron poker

is thickly coated

in velvety black soot.

I stir what’s left;

the few embers briefly flare,

then cool

to a dull orange-red.

I watch until it’s dead.

Until the last of the fuel fades

then flickers

before the once blazing fire

snuffs quietly out.

And anticlimactically ends

in a curl of wispy smoke

like a last shallow breath.

But combustion isn’t clean.

Even cremation is incomplete,

there are still the cremains

to be returned to the mourners

in an ornamental urn

or cardboard box.

Perhaps, with sufficient heat, it would all burn

until nothing was left;

no bone

crushed into coarse grey powder

and small hard nubs,

and none of that thick black soot

adhering to the firewall. 

Every atom

to the very last

converted into energy —

from sunlight to tree

and wood to heat

then back to light again.

Which, at speed, is now passing Jupiter

on its way to the edge of the galaxy.

Just as I Love Lucy

beamed out in the 50s

reached Alpha Centauri

4 years on,

too weak

for a rabbit-eared TV

but just as many laughs.

Not an afterlife, exactly.

But more alive

than the inert matter

cooling rapidly

in the bottom of the stove.

No, I didn’t do the arithmetic. Didn’t calculate the distance to Jupiter and the speed of light. Just thought that among the outer planets, “Jupiter” sounded best! 

Some readers might see in this an allusion to a soul or spirit surviving the demise of its body; a life force or consciousness that persists after death. Perhaps, as they’re presented with a box of cold lumpy cremains, they will find the thought of some kind of afterlife comforting. I hope they do.

But this isn’t my belief. I think of death as utter extinguishment: as hard to conceive as it is, an eternity of nothingness. Because consciousness, like the mind, arises from the brain and dies with the brain; there is no spirit separate from the body. So if anything, this poem is simply the First Law of Thermodynamics in action (the conservation of energy).

Not terribly poetical, I know. But I like the circularity of this example:  light from the sun transformed into matter, then back to light (and heat of course). Nothing wasted or lost. A closed circle. So the light that fire cast on you hasn’t gone. It’s still radiating off, racing away somewhere in space at app. 3 million metres/second.