Christmas on the Doorstep

I look above to velvet sky amid the Winter night,
Orion rising through the dark, Rigel blue and bright.
I see Hunter’s sword where misty birthing stars shine clear,
And glowering Betelgeuse, dimly red, marks the dark months of the year.

In aged bloated body, the giant’s embers glowing low,
Self devoured, consumed within, ashes choking now,
The time will come, the spark will fade, pressures no more to be borne,
And the giant will blaze in his final incandescent morn.

Betelgeuse awaits the day his fires dim and die,
When he will burst his iron heart in his final fiery cry,
The Red Hand of the Hunter will shed his sundered flesh,
In a divine wind suicidal, to nurse his children’s creche.

The shattering of his death throes will seed all coming things,
Tin, silver and nitrogen, and gold, the gift of kings,
Oxygen, uranium, all these he will give,
And carbon darkly bright, that his children’s childer might live.

The Hunter’s sword in spangled sky shines with birthclouds bright,
Full circle round the story comes in gleam of new starlight.
“Fiat Lux” says the old tale, but the wonder strikes me through,
When from my garden step, at my own back door, I see the birthing of the new.

The new stars gleam like diamond dust studded in dusky swirl,
And shimmering vapours shroud the stars in glowing, glimmering pearl.
We live in a universe of marvels, all there for anyone to find,
Needing only open eyes and ears, and more, an open mind.

They say we are born of ashes. They say we go to dust.
But they never said how this came to be. That irks me and thus,
This night I leave the party, to stand amid icy blast,
The sound of Jingle Bells and Silent Night from the indoors drifting past.

I watch the skies through lucid air, and the birthing stars proclaim
The cyclic story, creation’s glory and how the death of others became,
The birth of the new, the start of all. Creation’s children are us.
Ashes to ashes? But what ashes! We are all born of stardust.