Expectations
Our fabulous flying wheel galaxy
plows head-first through intergalactic space.
Seven thousand mile per minute taxi
bound for the Virgo Cluster's misty trace.
Our Sun bounces on gravity's tether,
speck in a collective starry flower.
Astrophysicists predict fair weather
ahead, half a million miles per hour.
A quarter of a billion year trip
carries Earth once around the Milky Way.
We plummet through the thick and thin of it;
gas pockets, dust clouds, Spiral arms' melee.
Our present course is relatively clear
and beyond the Oort Cloud's icy comets
the solar wind of our heliosphere
expands to shield the inner planets.
The latest figures confirm we'll be fine;
asteroid Apophis will zip past soon,
on April thirteenth, twenty twenty-nine
and miss by one-tenth the span to the Moon.
The odds of cataclysmic collapse
of universal ‘false' to ‘true' vacuum
are one in a trillion perhaps.
Such an occurrence would radiate doom.
The galaxy is aswarm with black holes,
as many as one hundred billion,
but the chance of meeting these light-limned coals
is reckoned one in a quadrillion.
Last, we've four billion years to prepare
for Andromeda's insistent advance,
but life, wherever it dwells won't despair
as our galaxies gracefully dance.
Gulf of the interstellar medium
teems with miscellaneous cosmic threats.
Astrophysicists counter tedium
by cataloguing them and making bets.
BUT, through my premonitory portal
I see a quantum loopy half-dead cat
throw dice with a sad redundant turtle.
I don't expect they'll be expecting that.
poem by Diane Hine
Added by Poetry Lover
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