How To Hope: The Nature Of Starlight
Comments on the occasion of a memorial service for Barry Richard Groner (1950-2025) as preface to a poem for he and his wife, Diana Joy Newton.
Note: This post has been corrected. The original version incorrectly indicated the speed of light in terms of miles per hour instead miles per second.
It is hard to find that you didn’t share one or more interests with Barry Groner. He and I both read voraciously, owned and appreciated BMW motorcycles, were students of saxophone and guitar…radio, photography, philosophy, astronomy.
How fast does light travel? I wager most of us presume we know. It moves through the vacuum of space, unencumbered, at 186,000 miles per second, right? Before it can transit the cosmos, however, a photon must first fight its way from the core of the star that gives birth to it. We calculate this takes 100,000 to 1,000,000 years of the star’s lifetime. Only then is light off and running through spacetime. It is quite a trip, this journey of light. How does it end?
Some astronomically tiny amount of these photons arrive here at our little perch on the edge of the Milky Way. By the time they arrive, the star from which they came might be long gone. Light lives a life of its own. Some arrives at the precise moment when we might be standing outside looking up into the night sky. Its caress lands painlessly upon our cheeks.
This is a poem about what happens next.
The Nature Of Starlight
Here among the trees a moose stands, watches the sky munching, wondering why Here among the trees a bun hops across the ground hop, hope, stop, rebound Here among the trees roots, trunk, branches, bark and leaves time grows tall from seeds Here among the trees hearts aspire to greater heights towards day and night Here among the trees ancient, soft, mystic starlight shines among the stand Here among the trees two lives illuminated hoof and paw hold hands
Jonatha Chance | Copyright © 2024 CC-BY-NC-ND (4.0 International)
