Photo by Jong Marshes on Unsplash
In elementary school I learned
Buzz Aldrin sat on the moon
238,900 miles up, 30 earths away.
We glued our baby eyes to the grainy TV
to see his “magnificent desolation.”
In middle school I learned
the Mariana trench was seven miles down
submerging Everest by a mile, dread cold but spewing fire.
We shuddered like submarines falling
into the sunless scar of the western Pacific.
In high school I learned
earth races 91 million miles from the sun
itself a crumb in the universe, such a magnificent word that,
and then our heads would dizzy-spin into black holes of incomprehension
what is man that thou art mindful of him?
In Sunday school I learned
Jesus time-traveled from sacred to profane
in the second it takes to avert one’s eyes, to wink, to weave a lie.
He dropped down to check on his father’s magnificent desolation
(and we earthlings, too).
But death-gazing is where I learn
Jesus plumbs the fearsome trench, the heart
of dark scars where nothing lives.
His life-guard leap into the abyss shattered the cosmos
and brought the luminescent far irresistibly near.