Tag: astronomy

The Night Sky

Once upon a time

I would lie under the starry night

In utter darkness

To do a Messier marathon

I knew those magnificent

Beauties of the night sky

By their first name

Out of nowhere

They would appear

Once sun disappeared

We would behold them

In the field of view

Of our small and big

Telescopes facing the night sky

Just like the sun

Constellations would dip too

Below the horizon

While new ones appeared

Nothing compares to the

Silence and darkness

Of the dark night sky

Which has inspired

Countless artists and poets

I trust the night

It removes the blinding lights

Both sun and moon are absent

We can peer much deeper

And beyond

Going back in time

14 billion years is the age of the Universe

Along the way multitude of stars

In the billions of galaxies

Are burning away

Fusing atoms together

Forming newer elements

Elements that make you and me

And every being on this planet

We are after all atoms

Trying to figure out atoms

A scientist famously said

Annihilation preludes creation

And vice versa

Creation of new particles

And elements go on

Till the stable ones are born

Nature loves stability

But then entropy is a reality too

In the great cosmic churning

Life indeed is a miracle

But then…

One day after millions of years

The sun will die…

It will engulf the earth

Growing into a red giant

Till then we will play perhaps

This game of war and fear

While sending missions into the space 

Such contradicting realities of our existence

We needn’t end it all here and now

We are self similar beings

Made of same cosmic dust

It would be such a pity

To cut this fabulous story short!!  

PS: Inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s book – Poems to Night

Irony

I became you

And you became them

All boundaries blurred

Between predators and preys

Every role flipped

In a role reversal

Victims turned into proud bullies

Preying upon helpless victims

Me, you, us and them

We keep changing our roles

Going in circles

Irony itself has become ironical

Like never before

I has been replaced by AI

Human by machines

Humans have turned into

Well dressed mannequins

Frozen like zombies

Doom scrolling away

Devouring themselves

Life has turned into monstrous death

In the finest of all role reversal

They feel most alive

When they kill

A movie showing severed flying head

Gets all the screens

While life affirming Space film

Finds hardly a space

Addiction to violence!

Ironically life always wins

Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Didn’t change anything

Cherry blossoms do bloom

And paper cranes are still a craze

Ironically the victim nation

Never built the bomb

It ended the cycles 

Of trauma and violence

But the bully nation

That built and used it

Is back with the same flex

Ironically bullies often

Call themselves victims

What scares them?

Addicted to violence and power

They refuse to give up

Their carnal desires

While Artemis II is on its way

To the darker side of the moon

Humanity has plunged

The planet Earth

Into one of its darkest phase

How diabolical

And Ironical!

Difficult Days

These are difficult days

When reality occults the dreams

It is bizarre isn’t it?

Reality that we try to figure out

Or try to make sense of ?

Is this also imagined ?

Then what is real?

What I think is real real?

The time that ticks away?

Or the dream that fades over time?

Is time too imagined?

Just like dreams ?

Sun does rise for real

But again it’s a play

Play of light, atmosphere

We see it before it even 

Peeps over the horizon 

While setting sun lingers elsewhere

It rises for us in full glory

It illuminates the tiniest dust particles

While darkness engulfs elsewhere

With no power to light their lives

Powerless have to make through

Another cold imprisoned night

Maybe darkness is a blessing

That hides the cruelty, rubble

That amputated humanity

Missing its phantom spine

Where do we go from here? 

Dreams are the only ransom

We can pay

To continue existing

Dreams of freedom

And that hopeless hope

Stars twinkling away far off

They are the witnesses

Of how our sun was born

And our Earth came into being

How dinosaurs roared and vanished

Maybe if we can fine tune

From somewhere

Maybe it is still visible

How it all began

The eternal cycle of

creation and destruction

It is such a pity

We want to behold pleasure

Which comes at the cost of pain!

We want to behold AI

Which comes at the I

These are difficult days…

Stranger

A stranger stares at me

Whenever I look at the mirror

A school girl with two pigtails

A college goer

A trekker

A writer

Stranger takes many forms

All forms seem

Like a figment of imagination

The mirror itself has gone missing

The images are stuck in my head

My self tries to time travel

I climb the hills

But I go out of breath

The pigtails are gone too

A writer perhaps still thrives

Who will keep record

Of all these strangers?

They grew up with me

And then abandoned me

Or maybe I abandoned them

It’s not just them or me

The world has become a stranger too

Victims have turned perpetrators

Little children no longer grow old

To stare at the mirror

To remember their many strange selves

As we go further to discover

Ever expanding edges of the Universe

We seem to be collapsing

Just like those stars running out of hydrogen

We are made of star dust after all

Stars taught us to go nuclear perhaps

Just like a habitat with prey and predators

We continue to live in a concrete jungle

Though roles get reversed in every epoch

Predators become prey

Hunted turn into hunters

How long will it take for us

To be humans?

Mirror has no answers

My many selves and versions

Collapse into one too

The one that is trapped

Behind the mirror or screen perhaps

A virtual self…a stranger

Stares back at me!!