To This Coy Universe
Joseph A. Soldati
Margaret Reid Poetry Contest for Traditional Verse 2007 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention
[Many physicists predict that a rapidly accelerating universe such as ours means that the cosmos as we know it, and thus the future itself, will end.]
O Universe! on which I used to depend,
how is it that you, too, will end?
The latest astro-notion, however right,
claims that infinity is, perhaps, finite.
So, though I have a fixed time to love
and laugh and live with the sun above,
I'm letting you know that we are through;
never again will I be faithful to you.
So go: expand, grow dim, accelerate away
(donít tell me "we can still be friends one day"),
before you turn yourself inside out
like a collapsed funnelóbowl through spout.
Thus the lovely sun, whom poets call Old Sol,
will explode, incinerating earth in a fiery ball,
as Revelations predicted, God's great onus.
I have to ask, is this a cosmical joke on us?
In time, one human life makes but little splash,
yet should my future heirs be turned to ash?
Must it follow what physicists have spokenó
the end of the futureóand me, heartbroken?
O Universe! how I used to delight
in adoring your charms when I awoke at night,
but at three o'clock this morning I could surmise
that lurking dark energy beyond the skies,
something quite possible, seemingly irrational,
proclaimed by scientists as anti-gravitational,
that sucks in distant galaxies one by one
until they are lost and cold and left undone,
at rest forever in intergalactic night
like a photograph of dancers frozen in flight.
And when they explode, becoming free,
there will be no one here, no one to see
them decay into iron that cannot rust
and then to quintessence-less cosmic dust.
In brief, you are gone in a billion trillion years:
For this, your inconstancy, I lie prostrate in tears.
