Me only cruel immortality Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms, Here at the quiet limit of the world, fourteen billion years after the Primordial Era only too aware that our swan-like Stelliferous Era will after many a year dwindle towards its end and all I have to look forward to is the lights going out one by one across the universe, galaxies coalescing, stars burning down to embers, till luminosity is but a memory. Then will come the Degenerate Era after a hundred or so trillion years when the brand-newness of star-formation is matter for photo-album-nostalgia and there remain only brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, all collapsing inwards, the universe spiralling down the drain swallowed after 10 duodecillion years by the Black Hole Era – till even black holes evaporate gradually bringing about the unending end, the Dark Era, 100100 years of waiting, positrons, boredom and cold in which particles pass one another across the street, barely saying hello. After that, well, there may be something else: belated divine intervention, a crunch, a big rip in which spacetime itself is torn to pieces but I know I will still be here remembering Ilion, remembering you. _______________ * After Alfred Tennyson, ‘Tithonus’ (1860), and Fred Adams and Gregory P. Laughlin, The Five Ages of the Universe: Inside the Physics of the Universe (Simon and Schuster, 1999). ![]() Jonathan Taylor is an author, lecturer, editor and critic. His books include the novels Melissa (Salt, 2015) and Entertaining Strangers (Salt, 2012), the memoir Take Me Home (Granta, 2007), and the poetry collection Musicolepsy (Shoestring, 2013). He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester. His website is www.jonathanptaylor.co.uk.
1 Comment
1/17/2017 02:57:43 am
I am inspired about this reading, it opened up my mind to the things that I am not giving attention at. I am glad that I have seen this and this will surely be shared to my friends as well. Thank you for sharing this to us. A poem about the Universe will surely amaze you
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