The Spirituality of Celestial Bodies

Born in explosion, you,
dear proto-Earth, call it
Hell. Your skin burns and blood ruptures
at every crease and seam. You spin
wildly, no balance, except for the distant gravitational
dance with the Sun. Intense meteorite impacts mark
the end of the Hadean and your moon

is coming, a little less than half
your size, it penetrates you deeply
throwing you down, and bursts into your
core, shredding most of your skin and
atmosphere into space. Your fingers struggle for
the moon, your spinning speeding to eight hours per
rotation until gravity ties you to your only
satellite, balancing you at a 23.5° axial tilt.
Cooling too quickly, your tectonic plates
scar and never really heal,
constantly crashing over your molten
blood.

-

Archean, beginning
of your life as an official planet.
The moon is now in synchronous
rotation and so close it fills
the night sky with light
deep red, because it's still burning, and you
are trying to forget
the burning.

Your bones are breaking
mountains rising and sinking ocean
trenches form. The moon pulls
warm tides hundreds of miles in a few
hours, then back again,
and again. Your stromatolites, your
festering mud pools, give birth to
your first children, non-nucleated
single-celled organisms, lovingly
called Prokaryotes.

It's a beginning, this Archean,
followed by eras and eons and ages
of your spiraling courtship
with your moon.

-

Because it is spiraling away.
So you hesitate every day
to twenty-four hours. We exist
now, because of the oxygen revolution 2.4
billion years ago, to comfort you in place of
those precious first-lives killed by
air, but you're used to your children dying
from evolution. But we have

eyes and fingers to chart
the leaving moon, intelligence and tools
to stand on its dead body and though we learned
spirituality 32,000 years ago, we finally understand
that some bodies are too large
to bury and our lives are too short
to record your history when
time dissolves.

-

It's the Sun, who is the great
hourglass of thinning sand. We,
bathed by your tides and warmed
from your belly, die in flames from the Sun
swelling 250 times the normal radius and passing
your orbit. But the moon, your precious companion,
who saw you before you were a planet, saw
you ugly and blistered, saw you a mother
and a home, is still tied to you. And dying

is the color red, reminding you
of your birth until you understand
it is the same.