Meteor Shower Poem by C Richard Miles

We waited, as time’s video-recorder pause-button was pressed on,
Anticipation languishing trapped in soul-destroying, sloth-slow motion,
Wide, childlike eyes fixed on scarab-black silk sheets of sky, bright
Dotted with the diamond dandruff flakes of soft, sugary starlight,
Reflections of crystal-encrusted meadow, stiff with fingers of frost,
As steaming cattle munched and dozed, munched and dozed
In the field, white breath rising under the cold, ice-white moon.
Soon, we murmured, adding our small breaths, soon, soon, soon
There will be one. Look, Look! Is that a tiny twinkle? But, in vain,
Only the on-off, on-off, rhythmic pulsing of put-putting plane
Caught our gaze. No sign of the long-awaited astral visitors,
Space-travelling fireflies, lost in the deep ocean of the cosmos,
November’s natural firework display, mysterious, mystic meteors,
Flashes, almost only in the imagination, an infinitesimal airforce
Firing silent tracer-bullets across the wide, infinite abyss of night,
Each a glimpse in the memory, coming and going quicker than sight.
Minutes dripped in the hourglass of expectation till, bright as gold,
Silver, sandgrain seconds sifted swiftly past, in nameless numbers untold,
Fleeting pinpricks of perception, each a shy, timid, glimmering ghost,
Shooting-star cosmonauts, friction-heated heralds of heaven’s host,
Glowworm navigators, disorientated by earth’s hungry gravity’s pull,
Swimming for their lives in early winter sleep’s bottomless, dark pool.