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