From the 2018 edition of Young Idea, available May 2018

———

The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.

-Carl Sagan

Jodhpur

The sun rising in the sky, already hot,

A slanted street, a tiny home, a green door,

Home to a boy unknown, a boy slipping into the streets.

The Blue City with sandstone houses, chipping paint.

The world is turning, the people moving, the markets bustling.

Loose and flowing clothes, vibrant colors, rich reds and oranges,

Busy streets, auto rickshaws, a woman sweeping.

India

Vibrant colors, a diverse culture, 1.3 billion human beings,

Young engineers with hopeful minds, a brightening future,

An elderly woman washing in a pool, a man walking with a stick,

A group of women trekking across the endless desert.

Cities, villages, farms, palaces, a world within the world.

Earth

Ice covered polar caps, vast expanses of looming mountains,

Blood red sand, endless deserts, the sun spilling across land.

Glowing cities light up paths like nerve endings.

Limitless oceans, colossal forests,

Dips and ridges, peaks and hills,

Gorges in the earth like the ridges in a hand.

The Solar System

A hot red ball of light, giving life, pulling the planets in.

Mercury, a cool grey, craters like potholes.

Venus, covered in clouds, storms brewing in the yellow sky.

Earth, filled with life, colors, billions of living organisms.

Mars, the big red, perhaps a second home one day.

The Asteroid Belt, a traffic jam of long forgotten rock.

Jupiter, a solar system of its own, the Great Red Spot raging on.

Saturn, ringed by moons, tumbling on an endless freeway.

Uranus and Neptune, far away blues; Pluto, the forgotten, frozen.

And Voyager 1, carrying the sounds of long ago.

The Milky Way Galaxy

Rogue planets in eternal darkness, covered in miles of ice,

Countless stars, even more worlds.

The Solar System, there, a tiny dot in millions.

Spirals of blue fade into purple,

Dancing around one another like ballerinas.

Glimmering dots like lights at Christmastime,

A glowing gold centre around which we orbit.

Inside, a supermassive black hole

Four million times the mass of the sun.

The Local Group

The Great Spiral in Andromeda, our neighbor,

The two on a collision course long into the future.

The Virgo Supercluster,

Everything in sight another galaxy,

Billions of suns, trillions of worlds,

All but a tiny aspect of

The Observable Universe.

Our cosmic horizon, the end of our sight.

We’re everywhere and nowhere,

The same elements, hydrogen, helium,

The horizon of undiscovered, waiting, silent.