The Truth of the Sun

This poem appeared in Red Weather, the annual literary journal of Minnesota State University Moorhead, in Winter 2014/2015:

The Truth of the Sun

Something so ancient, so immense
must hold grudges and desires
in its core for an everlasting age, yet
its spent eons are a catch in the throat

of time, its fulminating gases, droplets
in the oceanic universe. Trailing
the links of an infinite chain
into the crazed blackness, it knows

itself a dying star, and wishes
the finish were a nearer certainty.
Consuming itself it swells, an endless hell
of burning on the long stake of its axis.

Such agony. Such tyrannous delirium.

We with our shorter lives, our cool
bodies black as blots of frogspawn
swimming in a soothing jelly, know
ourselves the focus of its brazen jealousy.

Under the Sun we are like the Moon,
igniting only with a borrowed light,
embraced by spiteful radiance,
forced to drink hot gold.