Sun

Preface

Color eggs for Easter.

The sun composes, free,

On a world's fragile warm blue shell

Fertility.

1

Incumbent in the gravity of one sun

Is the glow

Of a hundred thousand comets unfurled

In the blow

Of the solar wind to veil

Light across the stars,

Veer by sun and disappear

As grain of Oort shores

Until another orbit actuates

Their history

And immolates more ice within

Solar finality.

2

Ice may coat a stream

Or cube because of chill

But another property of water

Colder still

Is to be cement in sky

That only stars dispel,

A colored comet going by

Casting a cosmic spell,

Upon an awe-struck race who see

More in moving light

Than a stellar friction passing

By their casual sight.

3

Some each million years appear.

Their orbits go so far

They almost reach the nether pull

Of foreign fellow-star.

Comas may be huge or small.

Siberia received

A swat that flattened forests,

A ring of trees deleaved.

The ecliptic cannot smooth

Most orbits of such ice:

Old nuclei that immolate

Or pass our paradise.

4

Our race is now conditioned

To a comet in the sky.

Revelation's hubbub has become

A common sight.

No more suicidal scenes, as

When it tailed by.

It's reduced to overview,

A blur removed each night:

Wonder, merely; casual regard

With danger gone,

Visual reminder yet that heaven

Guides the wand.

5

An Oort Cloud of language

Floats within the head,

Nudged by a synapse or two

To fall out of the bed

As a nether particle and

Sash around the sun,

Immolate its energy or

Reappear, undone.

Words within a language

As modicums of sound

Used, return to garble in the mind

Of man, unbound.

Desuetude may dismay some

But gnosis of new space

Assures a host of comets

Rearticulate the race.

6

Time can measure us in flesh,

Or swing a comet through

Orbits as it wanes, but

There are always others after.

History in faintest light

Forecasts what will be renew

To the men within our genes

Who see similar night.

Egyptian as a bowl of stars,

We cast a mental net

Over all our mind imagines

Limited by Set.

7

Cast a comet by us.

Tails grail sky.

Gas and dust color-scroll

Our preternatural eye.

Chevron - past horizons

Moon or clouds occlude -

Cassiopeia's ear ring, in,

A few nights include.

Ziggurats were witness

To when last it came:

Archive Oort ices known now

By a newer name.

8

A slight debris of space junk

Contains what yet may fall,

And zooming by a planet, manned,

Animates her caul

With blue and yellow tails

Fanned across faint stars and then

Waning next to nothing

Brings relief to anxious men.

What would be mere scrap on Earth

Put in context, space,

Becomes a chalice of choice thought

That sheds light on our race.

9

An elemental sop, coagulate

Of space debris:

Acetylene and methanol

Gassing light, will be

Seen by species such as men

On planets that grow old,

Stationed by a sun where life

With warmth can still unfold

Innumerable species, endowed

A common spark

That began within the brew

Of comet trains through dark.

10

A wand I saw an A.U. long

Wrap around the sky:

Come, apparent, before dawn

And leave with dusk nearby.

Comet forged in deeper space

Than planets in a ring,

Four millenia until

More mankind may discern

What we had for many nights

In revelation's form:

A blur of blue and yellow light,

An ion banner swarm

From the frenzy of the sun,

The flare of one lone star

So familiar that we jade

And feel Him, unaware.

Afterword

Aunt Grace preferred her cabin

To vapid life in town.

Trees submerged her shadow there.

Mint and daisies grew.

Millie hoed the garden,

Mom won dominoes,

Embers in the fireplace,

Skunks with young in rows.

The door was always open

And nature orchard sweet

For a boy enraptured by

A world's solar sleight.

Merry Christmas,

Stan Renfro