The Forty-Nine (A Poem for the Pulse 49)
We are all made of stars, astronomers are now saying
Powerful supernova explosions
From neighboring galaxies
Made their way into ours
And became us
Our rhythmic pulsing
In the night
Confirms our membership
To an exclusive club
Of survivors
To their massacres
We are
Both miracles
And mutants
Our DNA
Is alien
And queer
To their worlds
This Galaxy
If modern astronomers can be trusted
And nearly half
Let’s say 49 percent
Of these planets
These bodies
Are composed
Of residual galactic matter
Then the iron in our blood
Is an outcast mixture
Of collapsed stars
Beyond the Milky Way
We are
Both miracles
And mutants
If the heaviest excesses
Of a galaxy’s death
Resurrect in the DNA of a neighbor
Attack as asteroids
Bring us to a pause as comets
Then no man-made eclipse
Will keep us from fashioning
Our own Milk Ways
Our own Galaxies
We are the Big Bang
We are our own Theory
We will be
As Shakespeare’s hero Orlando
Overthrown not by our enemies
But pulled together by love and fate
The dark energies of the cosmos
And this time
The exiled will offer no protection
From the lioness
The survivors will not be
Your fallen stars
Your martyrs
And it will be our bodies
Their clouds of gas
The bygone moons
That we conjure
As we dance
And as we die
That will herald in the New Galaxy
Let the silences continue
As you revel in your red skies
Of ravaged flesh
Your eulogies remain unspoken
As you erect Towers of Babel
Exploit this labor
Deny this divinity
Only because you have no language
To contain our phenomena
For those we have buried
Your throwaways
The castoffs of your retrograde
Exist not in far-away dimensions
Inert and obliterated
But rotate about us
Like Saturn’s Rings
Glorious unions of dust and light
Their dazzling is already Testimony
The shooting stars
To which you pray
Because death is mesmerizing for you
Occasionally survive your fires and winds
And become meteorites
Previously wistful streaks of light
The witnesses to your glassy gaze
Break through atmospheres
And make their mark
We are
the pulsing, dancing, meteorites
Survivors of the fires.
Our own Tributes.
We are the 49.
And this dancing
The Big Dips
The halo of our silhouettes
Is both a eulogy
And a Resurrection.
Of the fallen
Their Last Dance
Has just begun.
Written by: Miguel Garcia