Far and Near
by Harley White
- Published: Tuesday, November 12 2019 21:18
Wonders of the world abound
on our earthly stomping ground,
in the seven seas profound,
midst the heavens round us wound.
Images from reaches vast
by astronomers amassed
show in varicolored cast,
cosmic glories unsurpassed,
stories of the great immense,
begging questions why and whence,
scenes stelliferously dense,
bringing past to present tense.
Oh how tantalizing to
lose oneself in starry view
of galactic vision new
where a poet’s words ring true!
Tennyson’s ‘Far--Far—Away’,
penned for Music’s haunting play
with the sounds the words convey
as they whisper, swing and sway,
tells of ‘far’ from past long gone,
murmur from ‘his own life’s dawn’?
breath where ‘doors of death’ go on
through an open curtain drawn?
Whether time or space be meant,
or spacetime together bent,
still, whatever sense is lent,
far’s remote in its intent.
After sunset’s crimson blaze
we may raise a dreamy gaze
in escape from troubled days
to celestial splendors praise.
Will our search of cosmic sphere
teach us to esteem what’s here?
Oft stargazers too I fear
must look far to see the near.
~ Harley White
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Poem ~ ‘Far--Far—Away’ (For Music), by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1892) ~ (last poem at link shown below)…
http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/tenny05.html
Full article with various images ~ The Day The Earth Smiled…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Earth_Smiled
Image ~ Earth can be seen as a blue dot underneath the rings of Saturn in this image taken by Cassini on July 19, 2013.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Day_The_Earth_Smiled_-_Preview.jpg
Image description ~ In this rare image taken on July 19, 2013, the wide-angle camera on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has captured Saturn’s rings and our planet Earth and its moon in the same frame… Earth, which is 898 million miles (1.44 billion kilometers) away in this image, appears as a blue dot at center right; the moon can be seen as a fainter protrusion off its right side… The other bright dots nearby are stars… This is only the third time ever that Earth has been imaged from the outer solar system…
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
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