16 Billion Light-Years

 

13 Billion Light-Years

(“But we do see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while…” Hebrews 2:9a)

Granted, time creeps up slower than we thought.
Space optics, radar complexes, galaxies seen tinier
than a grain of sand,
13 billion light-years away.

And you took the time to stay here. You took
the time, by human measure,
and filled it with everything billions of years
old.

And now it takes no time,
you have overflowed the banks of celestial rivers
from before the foundation of the world.

All points touch in the suffering of the
Perfect one. How is my pain on your mind
when the continents conspired to set our
houses thousands of years apart?

There are times, merely moments, in truth,
when all of space and lineages, skyscrapers and
villages,
meet together in a unity I never considered.
Time slices, and then the slow turning again.

My neighbors live a shout away,
dogs and teens and grandpas and mowing machines,
meet together in a tune played by local breezes and
marine layers in the morning.

You live in my chaos, though the atoms collide
and hide your descending glory from my view.
Is it pure luck that the trees in my backyard
reach higher than my dreams of eternity?