Emily Strauss
The Question Remains
The question remains:
what happened to the sky
when space was as hot as a sun
in the last moments of the Big Bang
its microwave radiation swirling,
those first faint fluctuations leading
to galaxies, with dark energy blowing
space apart, expanding the universe--
and dark matter, not atomic at all
but gravitational scaffolding--
only these parameters to describe
the Whole, and ghostly neutrinos
the accumulated mass of time-
space ripples now gravity waves
visible in faint corkscrew swirls
interstellar dust floating in cold
permanent night, the heat lost
and silence expanding at light
speed, white points the sole heirs
faint eyes glowing after midnight.
The Question Remains
The question remains:
what happened to the sky
when space was as hot as a sun
in the last moments of the Big Bang
its microwave radiation swirling,
those first faint fluctuations leading
to galaxies, with dark energy blowing
space apart, expanding the universe--
and dark matter, not atomic at all
but gravitational scaffolding--
only these parameters to describe
the Whole, and ghostly neutrinos
the accumulated mass of time-
space ripples now gravity waves
visible in faint corkscrew swirls
interstellar dust floating in cold
permanent night, the heat lost
and silence expanding at light
speed, white points the sole heirs
faint eyes glowing after midnight.
Emily Strauss has an M.A. in English, but is self-taught in poetry, which she has written since college Nearly 300 of her poems appear in a wide variety of online venues and in anthologies, in the U.S. and abroad. The natural world is generally her framework; she also considers the stories of people and places around her and personal histories. She is a semi-retired teacher living in California.