Telescope
James Webb led NASA, and now his eponymous
Telescope’s pictures have taken astronomers
Far far beyond all our mere human history,
Back to the brink of the ultimate mystery,
Near to the moment when Nothing exploded
Into a Something which somehow encoded
All the conditions of all possibility
(So even us humans in all our fragility.)
It has nabbed photons whose tiny existence
Has somehow survived with unthinking persistence
Through billions of light years of undeterred travelling.
So, is life’s mystery finally unravelling?
Maybe, and yet I have noticed, when science
Discovers one answer, as if in defiance,
Nature, whose cussedness is indisputable,
Always finds new ways of being inscrutable.
Linda Crespi
