THE UNIVERSE IS EXPANDING

THE UNIVERSE IS EXPANDING

    Remembering Chicken Little

Are you struggling to remain small?

Or negotiate old distances?

Physicists have answered the call

There is a movement outward

 

Big Bang!

Have you noticed it? 

When I return to campus, as a retiree

I struggle to get from A to B

For thirty years I traversed this campus

Corner to corner, place to place

From office to classroom

And every imaginable meeting space

It never took this long

Students have always been challenged

To get from one end to the other

But, hats off, their generation is adapting

Through some evolutionary mechanism

Parking lots, our neighborhood

         Insert your own experience here

Everything takes more time

And energy to negotiate

When the universe expands

Everything does

Yonder, people must speak louder to communicate

And I do the same for them

Ladders extend higher

My girth and weight

But the future looks good

When I call upon the young 

They respond with such aplomb

Son, please take this stool 

That light bulb needs to be replaced

That one way up there

DRK

8/28/20

WORDS FAIL ME

As they did everyone else

It became far too chemical a thing

For talk to intervene

Corralled in self, and the struggle to survive

Love, the gift, edged out

By her need to receive

An impatient world hurried her through our plodding ways

People, palliatives,

Who knows what there was?

The guys, the highs,

The lows, doses, sizes

Cut short her time with us

Now the future, an eternal unsaid, unheard.

In the end she chose a private out

No thought to who would do the rig-a-ma-roll

And put her where her kids could go.

She impressed me with her survivability

Until the tragedy

The one we feared

Her end, at home in bed

We like to think life has no end.

Magic on the other side will help her find

a demon free place with the rest denied among our kind.

But rest may elude her even there

A loving God may busy her

One on one

Challenge her

With a world of work undone.

DRK

10/11/11

7/12/20