LYRA
I
Set in the black velvet of night, the beveled stars are
Strewn like diamonds displayed by an antic cosmic jeweler
Lyra, the instrument of Orpheus himself,
Was placed in the skies by the Gods, they say.
Emitting the sonic music of the spheres, perhaps.
Or is this just a fatuous construction?
Who hears music like this now?
No one is listening to the skies anymore,
Save for the astronomers who listen intently
For the faint echoes of the Big Bang,
So named ironically by Sir Fred Hoyle, now dead,
Whose Steady State Universe was aesthetically more pleasant
Than the one we apparently seem to inhabit,
Courtesy of Penzias and Wilson, of Bell Labs in New Jersey.
II
The ever greedy, ever wealthy underworld will keep what it takes,
You and I are pre-destined to be borne as part of the earth’ s crust
You and I dwell on its surface for awhile–this is permitted, and then
We are slid, inanimate, inert, resting on our own shelves,
Beneath Earth’s swarming living surface, yet safe above its molten core.
As we await the Revelation of the Sun’s apotheosis as a Red Giant.
Those who knew you or loved you will become melancholy,
And think from time to time of the days when you were animate
Able to move through time and act upon this earth
Consciousness processes everything but little is retrieved explicitly for us,
We only grasp the stubs of experience, and with difficulty at that,
Subjected as we are constantly to the chemicals that bathe our brains.
III
On the radio you are that disembodied voice,
To broadcast is to hurl your voice out into space,
Flinging it beyond the the solar system,
Off the cliff of consciousness, the precipice of sound.
The Orphics instructed their newly dead thus:
“Say: ‘I am a child of Earth and of Starry Heaven;
But my race is of Ouranos. ”
The parallels are obvious, are they not?
They knew, and they knew of us ahead of their time,
They knew the essence of this universe,
To them secrets of hidden things were revealed as to no others,
To them was given gifts and sacred knowledge.
They were always reaching us, finding us in the future.
It is for us to only try to grasp or recapitulate what they knew,
In our fragmented, halting fashion.
IV
And yet radio waves are our true emissaries into space,
Waveforms of sound keep travelling, the voices never die
They travel on and on, verbal pilgrims of this universe
Immortal disembodied sounds coursing through space.
Our own lyras, the remnants of our voices, still speaking eternally in the cosmos,
Reverberating on reverberating on reverberating on
Until the sweet music of earth and all of its peoples die and new transmissions cease forever.
