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Poem by N.J. Hynes
The poet N.J. Hynes, has written a beautiful poem inspired by my image Shells of Elliptical Galaxy NGC 3923 in Hydra that won the Galaxies category in the Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2019 competition.
The poem was published in the poetry magazine Magma 84, Physics, edited by Susannah Hart and Stav Poleg
I have kindly been given permission to post it here:
Astronomers call it a shell
you will remember that Wednesday... your teacher speaking more about supernovas:how they are, in fact, dying stars on the verge of becoming black holes
– Caleb Femi, "Thirteen"
but it’s not one you’d find on a beach,
not an empty house waiting for something
to crawl inside and float away;
it’s not polished, collectible, won’t fit
in your hand or on a glass shelf – more
a skid mark from a collision, a trace
that nothing passing by has swept clean.
If you were close enough to sniff the gas,
the eau de rotten eggs, anti-freeze,
you might be tempted to light a match
and be done with it – destroy this relic
of impacting galaxies, its outer lip
a memory of stars born together
in high-rise density, the forced intimacy
of collision and explosion; its edge
a warning to the young of black holes
waiting for them, the crescendo ahead
as they're pushed together and smashed
casting an imprint in old light and dust
that’s seen later, eons later, with wonder,
as if it weren’t happening now –
young black stars passing, leaving only
candles on cement, cellophaned flower
shrines, a text, a soul heaven sent
in a ripple of statistics, probabilities.
After "Shells of Elliptical Galaxy NGC 3923 in Hydra", photograph by Rolf Wahl Olsen, 2019
