I want to make you dizzy.
I want to make you look up into the sky and
comprehend, maybe for the first time,
the darkness that lies beyond the evanescent
wisp of the atmosphere.
The endless depths of the cosmos
a desolation by degrees.
I want the Earth to turn beneath you and knock
your balance off,
carry you eastward at a thousand miles an hour,
into the light, and the dark, and the light again.
I want you to watch the Earth rising you up
to meet the rays of the morning sun.
I want the sky to stop you dead in your tracks
on your walk home tonight
because you happened to glance up
and among all the shining pinpricks,
you recognized one as of the light of an alien world.
I want you to taste the iron in your blood
and see its likeness in the rust-red sands
on the long dry dunes of Mars.
Born of the same nebular dust that coalesced
random flotsam of stellar debris into
rocks, oceans, your own beating heart.
I want to reach into your consciousness and
cast it outward, beyond the light of other suns,
to expand it like the universe,
not encroaching on some envelope of emptiness,
but growing larger, unfolding inside itself.
I want you to see your world from four billion
miles away, a tiny glint of blue in the sharp
white light of an ordinary star in the darkness.
I want you to try to make out the boundaries
of your nation from that vantage point,
and fail.
I want you to feel it, in your bones, in your
breath,
when two black holes colliding a billion light years away
sends a tremor through spacetime
that makes every cell in your body stretch and strain.
I want to make you nurse nostalgia for the
stars long dead,
the ones that fused your carbon nuclei
and the ones whose last thermonuclear death throes
outshined the entire galaxy
to send a single photon into your eye.
I want you to live forward but see backward,
farther and deeper into the past,
because in a relativistic universe you don’t
have any other choice.
I want the stale billion-year-old starlight
of a distant galaxy to be your reward.
I want to utterly disorient you and let you
navigate back by the stars.
I want you to lose yourself, and find it again,
not just here, but everywhere, in everything.
I want you to believe that the universe is
a vast, random, uncaring place,
in which our species, our world, has absolutely no significance.
And I want you to believe that the only response
is to make our own beauty and meaning
and to share it while we can.
I want to make you wonder what is out there.
What dreams may come in waves of radiation
across the breadth of an endless expanse.
What we may know, given time, and what splendors
might never, ever reach us.
I want to make it mean something to you.
That you are in the cosmos.
That you are of the cosmos.
That you are born from stardust and to stardust
you will return.
That you are a way for the universe to be
in awe of itself.
