Lying
on your back. Feeling the grass growing,
Softening the strong earth behind your back.
Looking ahead, straight up into the sky.
Seeing the wide arc of the heavens,
A vast dome, unsupported, unpillared, distant.
Black?
Midnight blue? – It is midnight,
Late to be out here for a small boy.
Steely black. Unfathomable, with tiny twinkling stars.
Feeling the grass growing, pushing up little by little by
little,
As you look into infinity.
Stars
that sent their light a thousand years ago. Longer. How long?
Where are they now? Imploded? Gone?
Or still shining on, for others to see, aeons from now?
What is the meaning of time and space,
While lying on the growing grass in the darkness of the park?
The
unpolluted park has mopped up the city lights.
The leafy summer trees have absorbed
All but the faintest of the white noise of the city at night.
Quiet. A snuffling hedgehog. A distant owl.
Still. The warmth of an August night.
And
then, of a sudden, was that one?
Did you see it?
Over there.
There’s
another, falling like a spent rocket,
Still glowing, curving to the earth.
Somewhere beyond those trees?
Another.
And another. Shared excitement. I saw that one too.
The Perseid shower performs its miracle once more.
And
thirty years beyond my boyhood, I still recall that night.
Using different words, but alive again to the same feelings.
The dark park. The stillness.
The growing grass becoming lumpy against my back.
The starry heavens and the shooting stars,
Dropping to their death, and shining like tiny seed pearls.
The shared wonder and the sense of endless time and space.
