Never Say Never Poem by Paul Hartal

Can a fish swallow itself entirely?
The impossible can never be possible.

She shakes her head. Never say never!

He looks up at the night sky
with its shining stars.

I don’t believe we ever will know
all the secrets of the universe,
he says.
We live in a world
of innumerable mysteries
traveling on a small planet
around the Sun in the Milky Way.
Billions of remote galaxies surround us.
They are all unplumbed and inscrutable,
many light years away.
So how can the finite mind of man
accommodate and contain infinity?
Mind you, as a matter of fact,
we don’t even know ourselves.

She smiles. Still, never say never.
Look, for example, what Auguste Comte
said about the stars.
This French philosopher in 1842
published a volume,
titled “The Positive Philosophy”,
wherein he asserted that we would never
be able to know anything
about the chemical composition,
or minerological structure, of planets
and stars; and much less
about organized life forms
on their surface.

However, just a few decades after
Comte’s claim, by using the technic
of spectroscopy, measuring radiation
intensity and wavelength, astronomers
have succeeded to figure out
a great deal about the chemical
Composition of planets and stars.
Actually, the gas helium was discovered
in the Sun in the 19th century
before it was detected on Earth,
as well.
It turns out
that the chemicals in our bodies
are the chemicals of the stars.
And we are made of star dust.
Our dreams of the Moon and the Sun
and the stars are our longings
to return to our origins,
to our cosmic birthplace.
And the universe misses us, too.
So we continue to dream
and to write poems.