Elegy of Falling

ELEGY OF THE FALLING Elegy of the Falling Noel Glenn

When was the last time you went stargazing?

The last time you went out under that vast, infinite darkness, and searched out the spots of light punching their way through the infinite, hungering void?

Was it summer, when the air is so hot the stars themselves tremble from the heat? When the screaming of the cicadas drowned out even the white noise of your own head?

Or was it winter, when the cold silences the land so thoroughly that instead, it is the screams of the stars that reach you? When the howls of the wind only rarely lighten up enough to let the world breath, cold and numb and frozen?

Did the cold numb you, did the dark scare you, did the world itself seem at once too big and too little and too much?

Did you point the stars out to your friends? Share their names and their stories, the few of them that you could amongst that countless infinity?

Did you draw imaginary lines in the sky, give them meaning, give them lessons? Did you listen to others’, argue over the accuracy of these myths you’ve made of uncaring, incomprehensibly massive floating entities of flame?

Were you alone, with none but the stars and the night and the abyss to keep you company?

Did you contemplate the ground beneath your feet, the earth, the universe? Did you recognize your own insignificance, of you and everyone you loved, everyone you’ve ever known?

Did it scare you? Did the size of your whole existence, as big as you feel and as small as you are, terrify you down to the very marrow of your bones?

Did it invigorate you?

THE AKITAN When the universe gives you no meaning, no answers, no love, do you find them for yourself? Does the absence drive you?

Or do you cower under that blanket of stars, and pretend like they aren’t watching you die, every moment of your life?

Did time, for that one moment under the endless pattern of black and white, hold still? In your great moment of contemplation, with the whole of the universe spread out before you, beholden and beholding in turn, did the great flows of the world halt at your feet?

What would you do, with an eternity like theirs? Would you help someone? Destroy their very world?

Perhaps you’d simply watch, as our world, as many others, blink out.

It’s what we’re good at, after all.

Watching.

Did you watch them fall from the sky, a little piece of eternity burning itself out against the black night? Did you relate? Feel for that small part of the universe that sought to make itself into something, only to shatter into nothing for the effort?

Did you pity it? Sigh in shame at it’s great, wasted expenditure, mourn what could have been? Did it slip from your mind moments after, this quiet, lifeless death, unimportant for its absence of impact on your life?

Are there stars falling to the earth right now?

Landing right now?

Are they behind you?

Maybe you should check.