Physics

The stars! The stars; swelling and clear.
The stars that hang and disappear
Like the lighthouse gaze that opens and shuts,
As an eye to and from sleeping and dragging the dust;
The house of a star that they netted and kept
For the sake of the boats and the wives that They left.
But the void was not filled and the velvet sky cried;
"You've taken and left me with a hole in my side!"
And forever The Sky had to do just to gaze
At the star from her belly on the shore of the seas.
And the star knew no better, being just gas and air,
But The Sky kept on wailing - for fear! For fear!
She knew of the terror the seas could induce
When the winds picked up and the waves were let loose.
And when night such as this occurred on the Earth,
The Sky couldn't watch - foreseeing the worst.
But her star never knew her maternal plight -
For she was only atoms and light.

Her mother bore more children to remedy her pain,
To fill the space where the Earth Star had lain.
But the fishermen never knew of her tragic disgrace
For she was just a vacuum in the fabric of space.
For The Sky was only the absence of light
And her children just physics made visible by night.

The Lady in Blue

“And the clock”, said the Clockmaker, “shall chime the days,
And the bells will ring out to sea.
And the men at arms will fall away
When the wars write their own decrees.
And the Woman in Blue shall sing her last
As her sailor knows not his own sails.
And she’ll pack up her birds in cages shut fast,
And ask again to ring out the bells.
And time will take our freedom away,
As though it were a door made of locks;
Each turn of a key a new minute drawn,
And each cog a tick-followed-tock.”

And the Lady in Blue knew the truth
As soon as the Clockmaker said
That the clock, oh the clock, will render the days,
Will craft the sunrises from lead.

So she took up her birds and descended the stairs
To a chamber below ocean rock.
She plucked all their feathers and cut off her hair,
And set one thousand keys to their locks.
And with all the down and the hair from her head
She carpeted the walls and the floor.
She feathered cell, feathered not bed,
Her sailor turned the keys tight in the door.
And so, the ticking from the Clockmaker’s hands
Resounded across the shores.
But the Lady in Blue, deep beneath the sands,
Could hear none but her birds aching calls.

And so, with no time, no tick-followed-tock,
The Lady in Blue was set free.
Freed from the minutes – made free by the locks,
Keys spread across fathoms of seas.