We feel that the heavens move.
With our feet planted
on solid ground
we watch the stars travel
in slow circles overhead,
and see the vault of the world
spin like thermaling eagles.
It is dizzying.
Our senses tell us that
the universe travels past us,
around us,
for us.
We stand at the still center of creation.
We feel that the earth cannot move.
It is too big. Too hard.
Too much.
The untold weight of
the black oceans
and the hulking hills
and the human monuments
is too great to shift.
Our world is made of rock and iron;
it does not even bend,
let along move.
We can touch it. See it. We know.
We are wrong.
The earth is always adrift.
Flowing under us,
whole continents ripping apart
and creating anew,
throwing up mountains
and upending seas.
Hurtling us along,
passengers sliding around the sun,
whipping through the years
and leaning into seasons
in a carousel of changing days.
It is never still
and it pulls us
out of all control
through space and time.
The static world is just
a story we tell.
We do not know the things we know.
We can sense the truth of it, though.
When the ground has moved
too far beyond us,
and its broken rocking
has unsettled our bones,
we come to realize that
we are no longer
where we were.
We have lost our way to the thrashing earth.
We must look back to the stars, then.
Look to those points of hope
spun overhead through the world’s twisting.
Search the skies to find that
single still spark:
the North Star. Pole Star.
Resting above the hinge of time
and telling us where we are.
It is faint;
dim and hard to find.
We have to know it first to see it.
But it is there.
When all the earth has moved
and all the heavens
have rolled from end to end,
Polaris stays steady,
telling us how to set our feet
across a tossing world.
We can find our way home by its light.
