If only we'd spent more time, listening, we might have heard deepest Cosmos, singing on a song of hurt and loss: the unraveling of Saturn's skirts onto the planet below
For this is when the Ring Rains begin, when water particles tangled with rock shimmer and fall, succumbing to the call of gravity, a final act leaving only the planet below
Yet, its rings won't be lost, only altered as weather, a meteorological feature in the bug of time, 100 million years to go before an empty skyline; witness a planet below
And in the months ahead, in simulation of tilt and light, a trick of the eye, the blink of the night, the rings seen from here will be angled as shadow; sixth planet below
Audio Poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpiuJkSyt4E
“What we see when we look up, like what we see when we look around, is not a well-ordered clockwork ticking its way toward eternity. It is a mix of short-lived illusions, long-lived evolutions, meaningless overlays—the constellations we love, after all, are just superimposed serendipities, stars at vastly different distances seen as one—lucky accidents and unforeseen developments. Some comfort can be found in the indifference of the cosmos to our stories; some other comfort lies in the thought that the cosmos tells stories much like our own.” — Adam Gopnik, New Yorker