Size matters –
Doesn’t it just…
Not the hoary old joke
About how many inches of English oak
A man’s member must be to make a maid happy,
But size of an altogether more cosmic proportion…
Saw a shot from the Hubble Space Telescope
[After the astronaut-ophthalmologists had fitted
Its new prescription lenses]:
A cluster of five, stunningly-beautiful galaxies
Some 260 million light-years away
And maybe hundreds of light-years across…
And all that ineffable glory named after one human:
One ‘Stephan’.
‘Stephan Who?’ I thought;
Who can possibly rate such an outsize accolade?
General de Gaulle has a street named after him
In just about every town in France;
Robin Hood gets countless cafés and a Kevin Costner film
[The one without ‘tights’ in the title
But with the Bryan Adams/Michael Kamen anthem];
Nelson gets Trafalgar Square –
Though I guess he’d have settled for
Another night with Lady Hamilton
[Even with or without his ‘column’!];
Wellington, remembered not for Napoleon’s defeat,
But for rubber galoshes made for de feet.
So who is this ‘Stephan’
With more Milky Ways to his name than Cadbury’s….?
Who knows – surely someone does?
But here’s a thought –
Maybe [just maybe],
On an insignificant planet
Circling and equally insignificant sun
Somewhere in a quiet backwater of one of Stephan’s Five Galaxies
There’s intelligent life…
No, really intelligent life – not like here;
And maybe they’ve got their own ‘Hubble’ space-eye squinting at us
Down the long-lens of light-years and life-times:
A pretty, faint nano-pixel lost in what ‘they’ call the ‘Kevin Cluster’…..
And maybe that eponymous Kevin:
Is the illustrious boyfriend of the girl astronomer who discovered us
As a smudge on her lens;
And maybe he’s an inter-planetary, rock-guitar superstar
Hero-worshiped in as many languages as there are suns in their system,
Or a quiet, unassuming poet who speaks to the heart.
Maybe all of the above…
It figures…………..
In the heavens, there’s a hell of a lot of ‘above’….
…. and not a little of ‘beyond’!
