2 poems about the ending, the beginning


Panoply

I was thinking
Of the stars
In the Chronicles of Narnia
The stars
Who are people
Who had arrived here
Long ago
And the people-stars
Who will descend
In the last
Hours

A star
A sun
With a personality
Like the face
By Georges Méliès
For the moon
Except
The stars-as-people
Won’t have spaceships
In their left eyes

I guess
We have anthropomorphized
Everything that’s
Up there
And to place them up
When they
Are all around
A stellar populace
And are the comets missiles
Taking centuries to land
Because a century
To stars
Is an age of dinosaurs
On Earth

A stellar war
An interstellar war
With weapons
So slow
And more rarely hitting targets
As the universe has settled
That the gods of war
Must be red
In their frustration
For the cosmos
Clearly gives it up
No interest
In who wins

The interest is in
Sentience now
Like theirs
Worlds have it
And the possibilities
As life is
Sent around
First as microbes
Then support for all the lifeforms
As they grow
A day
An age
Inhabit all the Earth
As each Earth was made


Earthstruck

Early
Sun is prepping
Not appearing
Yet
Moon is tired
From its performing
Ready to set
To rest for a while
The stars in their courses
Seem confident
I think they will stay there
For a while
An age or more
Perhaps
An eon
If that’s longer
Then to fall
One by one
Onto the Earth
Of an apocalypse
Or so our own myth
Goes

And does the Earth expand
To catch the stars
Or will the stars
Actually send meteors
As
Representatives
Ahead of
Armageddon

How real is it all
All the blood
From the sky
And on the planet
Maybe
All of it shall happen
As depicted
And shall the saved
Be gone by then
Perhaps

Perhaps
Some of us must wait
Through tribulation
To send
The message
While there’s time
Even through the
Revelation horrors

Hurry up
Believe
More evidence around you
And the world is breaking up
Though there’s still time
Still pushing your agendas
Give them up
It’s over
But something new
And wonderful
Is coming

You shouldn’t want
To miss it


C L Couch


Ramandu (“star at rest”) and the daughter of Ramandu (no name given for her, though in the stories she is active) from The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis

Photo by Alex Shuper on Unsplash