Published by Poetry Editor on May 25, 2016. This item is listed in Issue 30, Issue 30 Poetry, Poetry

Temporally Illuminate

Time began, born
with a big bang
that flung fire and dust
into nothingness
Time slows as we
accelerate and
approach
the speed of light
Time travelers, we see
into the past
so easy that rocket
scientists do it without even thinking
Stars, the footprints
of time’s endless march,
cast thin light
but it is light
enough to see

— Ash Krafton
Ash Krafton (@AshKrafton) writes speculative fiction and poetry. She’s also the author of novel-length fiction, including the Demimonde trilogy and The Heartbeat Thief (under the pen name AJ Krafton). Krafton is a member of SFPA and Pennwriters and writes for the QueryTracker blog. She lurks in the heart of the Pennsylvania coal region but can be spotted at www.ashkrafton.com.

Editor’s Image Note: Eye inside the universe, the merging of two images: a visualization created from an Enzo adaptive-mesh simulation* of a cube of universe two billion light years on each edge—revealing a large-scale structure of galaxy clusters—is combined with an image of the human eye (galaxy-eye) created by Dyarchy (https://dyarchy.wordpress.com/author/dyarchy/)

*The simulation ran over one million CPU-hours on Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Thunder supercomputer. The data analysis and visualization were run on SDSC’s Data Star and NCSA’s Cobalt.) Science credit: Michael Norman (UCSD), Image credit: M. Hall (NCSA)

Tags: Ash Krafton