Mother Star Poem by Peter Black

My mother died and her ashes I cast
Into the wind and they were blown apart.
Her dust lifted and the Earth took her back,
Swallowed her specks; she returned to her start.

But where I stood, on the edge, looking down
A cliff that sloped in blocks down to the sea,
Something beyond, bellow, above I found;
I knew it there though it could not be seen.

I, the son of my mother am but one
Child set upon this orb in a mass
That were born from the great life giving Sun:
Held in her hands that burn as fiery gas.

I owe my mother and the sun my life;
Could not live if it was not by their touch,
Yet is man's existence so simple quite;
Man from man and Earth formed out of the Sun?

And as the particles of light my eyes
Stung, I thought of the first, the elder stars,
The first of the mothers to be alive:
Forged the elements; burned strong, fast, and hard.

There I knew my blood in a star once flowed
And its iron, but in an instant caused
My old mother's death: how did she explode-
I live in the corpses of long dead stars.

But how small and pointless does that make me:
One rare creature to be perfectly placed
Here on a world with the compounds life needs
To prosper; with a consciousness so graced.

When unfathomable forces propelled;
Collapsed the first generation of stars,
Did they have my life in mind to wish well,
The greater dying for something so small?

For I think of the Universe that breaks
In cataclysms stars, black holes and worlds.
Does it struggle and attempt to create
Or huff and puff in complete random bursts;

Pointless, no, but great importance is placed
On me, and man to honor our mothers
That died, so we our few short years may take.
We must prosper in good and move forward.
If man is alone the mind placed in space
So then much greater is our existence.
It falls on us the secrets to explain,
Despite our celestial loneliness.

Ah, but I am not a god that knows all,
But a poet that finds hope in all things;
And as I saw my mother's ashes fall,
Too saw stars; the future infinitely,

Spread out like a sheet across existence
Ready to be filled with new men and stars:
True emblems of life's very persistence,
Never halted, chained, and completely flawed.