A Farmer’s Son Watches Galaxies Turn, Groes Bach
Spring 1833 – mists folding their sheets in the fields.
Isaac Roberts feels the turned earth, his father’s
farm an island in the hurtling Milky Way –
splashes of cream across the churning ocean
wearing its distant reds, greens, unintelligible
darknesses. Those tools will cool his hands,
gravity magnetising them the closer he lies,
the flatter he is to the grass. Silage by star
light, all the gods are cloaked – good.
Cows low in the aperture, exposure long
as light years. In the measure of those burning
journeys to our eyes, the long clag of time
between Christmas and New Year, 1888 arrives.
He captures the Andromeda Galaxy in his plates,
shapes every nebula. The sky expands until time ends.
George Sandifer-Smith is a Welsh writer. He has published two collections, Empty Trains (Broken Sleep Books) and Nights Travel at the Right Speed (Infinity Books).