Sammi’s Weekender #213 (galaxy)

On the Edge of Forever

Words of uncertainty apply.
Probably, and maybe perhaps,
as proportions with numbers
inconceivable and unimaginable,
describe vastness where nearby,
local galaxies, about fifty-one,
are or were within a mere
three megaparsecs. So close.

Suicidal giants like Tadpole, Black Eye,
Sunflower, and Cigar. Our nearest
neighbor, Andromeda, plans to crash
our party in four or five billion years.

Like the cosmos,
this Milky Way is mostly nothing,
toying with conversions of
angular momentum, universal
collisions of astronomy’s galactic
darlings. The realm of nebulae,
halfway to the edge of the known
universe, whatever that is.

Look both ways to search for a “small, quaint, tidy universe.”
But science “never ends.”
Mind the gaps for a “single ultimate truth.”
(Quotes from Cosmos by Carl Sagan)