The Star-Gazer

I wander aimless through the ether,

For my gaze and heart cannot be bound long to this sphere,

Or to these crooked, narrow streets amongst the realms of Earth;

For high above the span of worldly plains

Hang lands of vast and breadth-less mystery.

What are the hills of Earth to the grey and cragged mountains of the Moon?

And what the ice caps of the Arctic to the deathless chill of Pluto?

What know we of the extremities of beauty and suffering

That lie within the universe?

We who can but see only a fixed prism of colors

And who thus deem the rest to be invisible.

What hues, what sensations, what wonders await

Those who have but the patience to grope past the realms of the finite

And look upwards towards that which is infinite and intransient:

For he who does so gazes not upon mere ether but eternity,

And the astronomer who turns his eyes upon Luna’s pallid face

Looks not upon a dead rock in ceaseless circuit ‘round our world

But upon the constant Beloved of poets long interred beneath the Earth.

Afterword: It is my belief that the gaze has its own journeying appetites and that the imaginative properties associated with the wandering eye constitute their own realm of experience and exploration. Though the body may be motionless, the eye is always restless.

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Journey.”

© 2015 by Colin Harker. All rights reserved.