Who were they, what lonely men
Imposed upon the fact of night
The fiction of constellations
And made commensurable
The distances between
Themselves their loves and their doubt
Of government and nations;
Who made the dark stable
When the light was not? Now
We receive the blind codes
Of spaces beyond the span
Of our myths, and a long dead star
May only echo how
There are no loves nor gods
Men can invent to explain
How lonely all men are.
This poem is from a collection called “The World I See”, by Patric Dickinson, which was published in 1960. The poem was inspired by a visit to Jodrell Bank observatory. I have posted it before, but it seems apt to post it again now.
In the Dark 