The Great Explosion

The universe expands and contracts like a great heart.

It is expanding, the farthest nebulae

Rush with the speed of light into empty space.

It will contract, the immense navies of stars and galaxies,

           dust clouds and nebulae

Are recalled home, they crush against each other in one

           harbor, they stick in one lump

And then explode it, nothing can hold them down; there is no

           way to express that explosion; all that exists

Roars into flame, the tortured fragments rush away from each

           other into all the sky, new universes

Jewel the black breast of night; and far off the outer nebulae

           like charging spearmen again

Invade emptiness.

                               No wonder we are so fascinated with

       fireworks

And our huge bombs: it is a kind of homesickness perhaps for

       the howling fireblast that we were born from.

But the whole sum of the energies

That made and contain the giant atom survives. It will

       gather again and pile up, the power and the glory—

And no doubt it will burst again; diastole and systole: the

       whole universe beats like a heart.

Peace in our time was never one of God's promises; but back

       and forth, live and die, burn and be damned,

The great heart beating, pumping into our arteries His

       terrible life.

                           He is beautiful beyond belief.

And we, God's apes—or tragic children—share in the beauty.

       We see it above our torment, that's what life's for.

He is no God of love, no justice of a little city like Dante's

       Florence, no anthropoid God

Making commandments,: this is the God who does not care

       and will never cease. Look at the seas there

Flashing against this rock in the darkness—look at the

       tide-stream stars—and the fall of nations—and dawn

Wandering with wet white feet down the Caramel Valley to

       meet the sea. These are real and we see their beauty.

The great explosion is probably only a metaphor—I know not

       —of faceless violence, the root of all things.