Infinity is dark blue –
not black – and not empty.
Space, understand
is neither infinite nor black,
though it is vast beyond imagining,
teeming with life,
roiling between light
and the absence of light,
ever-changing and alive.
Weirder things that we can imagine
become and un-become.
Life is determined, tenacious.
Things are born;
Things die;
Things get reborn.
Space is the greatest cauldron,
churning and heaving
with every possibility.
Some stars are fixed,
some stars are not.
Keen-eyed youths stood
side-by-side on hilltops
with the wisest elders
noting precisely the rising and falling
of every celestial thing,
over nights short and warm;
over nights long and bitter.
On broad plains
marked with sticks,
marked with stones,
angles calculated
with all possible precision,
observatories rose,
Born of stone and sweat,
holy places
where the sky could speak.
And we listened
and we learned
and we changed
and we became
and we adapted
and we explored
and we listened
and we learned
and we changed
Cold starlight flowed
from midnight-drenched skies
through the stones
into minds finely tuned,
where it was warmed
by blood and flesh;
where it transformed
in serpentine splendor,
into That Which Cannot Be Told.
But the stars were not our only teachers
in that time, and long before;
Trees and flowers
stones and water
creatures of earth and air,
great and small;
Every one a teacher
or a friend
to those willing to listen.
We learned which herbs relieve pain,
or stop bleeding,
or bring sleeping,
or relieve fevers,
or strengthen the heart,
or stop coughing,
by sitting on the ground;
By being humble enough
to make friends with plants.
We learned how to hunt
and how to hide.
We learned by laying on our bellies
in the doting dirt;
We learned perched in trees,
singing to the leaves;
We learned sitting perfectly still
by the hives,
covered in the music of bees.
We found our music
in air and fire,
in stones and water.
Inspiration came;
That was no problem.
She was always a breath away.
We cultivated her gifts
from flowers and fungi
to keep her closer still.
In time we became giants.
Our reach exceeded Rome’s,
so they poisoned us
with their polluted religion;
cut us down to size;
Taught us to revile
those most revered
as unclean, as chattel.
We often refused to comply.
They taught our young men
that might makes right;
That women are to be controlled;
That female ideas are evil;
That the Goddess –
our loving Mother,
our lover, our sister –
is an abomination in the eyes
of their angry, bloodthirsty, male God.
And oh! how they learned.
And oh! how they burned
those learned sisters
with their herbs and potions,
with their books and their bags;
with little explosions and dark
smoke that induced hallucinations
for miles around as the air raged,
frenzied and vengeant.
In the end, our people could
take no more terror.
They fell, became less,
accepted Rome’s lord and savior
at the point of a sword,
and duly became ashamed
of the power and the brilliance
and the loving and the learning
and the truth of our being.
But She finds a way,
always, always.
Our stone observatories,
holy places where the sky speaks,
terrified the interlopers
and they kept well away;
And so they stand,
and we remember –