We’ve been out for the whole of time mining for answers.
Telling stories of ourselves.
I could offer you parallel universes.
Those in which others veer wrong instead of your own.
In one, it’s someone else’s daughter chained to a hospital bed.
In another, your sister isn’t dead but drinks light straight from the stars.
In a third, your mother doesn’t shroud blue wings at each grief.
The one where you’re soaked in sun on November nights.
There are so many options here.
To concern us.
You can have all these worlds.
Here, take them. Tuck them tight between your bedsheets.
We put on microscopes, telescopes.
We split atoms into quarks, antiquarks: force fields where anything isn’t any thing.
We send out Mozart, bird calls, satellites, probes to chart the unknown.
We translate our unmaking, decline our one-and-only faces for androids of silicone, simile.
We give away our eyes, our ears, our memories and toes.
We spend our cells on the newest frontiers.
What’s next is never enough.
We donate our grandmothers on respirators for selfies: umpire of the all-consuming ‘I.’
All left to chance shrivels.
One more day to dream without power lines and fences fracking.
Why are we here?
What about the monks’ mumble, stumble on wild temples of the strange?
What about our elastic gropes at conjuring
what might or might not change?
One more hour to listen to each other’s whale song of breath.
One more moment to talk it all out.
I speak now just like you.
I speak now because I’m shattered.
I speak now because I just missed the train.
Let’s linger on the platform.
So desperate to know we’re not alone.
What shall we do when we find each other?
Click here to read Elly Katz on the origin of the poem.
Image by Aldebaran S on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- Glass Nebula - October 3, 2025