Healing a Man
“The event horizon, the boundary of the region of space-time from which it is not possible to escape, acts rather like a one-way membrane around the black hole... One could well say of the event horizon what the poet Dante said of the entrance to Hell: ‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here.’” Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time
My role: stowaway
orbiting the lip of darkness,
aiming what light I can over
the swallowing curve.
Something kind tethers me
so I won’t unwittingly follow my own prayer
down a throat that knows only
to swallow and crush
all it can.
It seems pointless, this sending light into you
hoping it will return to me encoded and alive,
phosphorescent diatoms on the breast of a dark sea,
but I persist. We don’t know the limits of possible
so don’t speak to me of odds.
Echoes can spring from soft places
and water can re-climb falls
and light can escape
from the heaviest pull of oblivion
if some number of stars
in some number of galaxies
in some number of dimensions
we may never know
consent
all of an instant
to let it through.
The odds of our being
are infinitely small,
yet here we are.
by Holly L. Thomas
© 2005