NORTHERN LIGHTS

                                                              










            

Here in the North,

The stars seem closer and brighter

And out on the high road

I sense my place – or displacement –

Between the terrestrial and celestial.

The comet is clear tonight,

Clearer than for millennia, they say,

Its tail trailing through the heavens

Like some frosty sperm

Destined who knows where or where from:

Perhaps an infinitely strange womb someplace

Or maybe a barren blankness in random space.

But thirty-nine people in California today,

Believed in a great ship

Travelling in the comet’s wake,

Coming from the other side of the universe

To collect their sect, the elect,

Who happily committed suicide collectively,

Hoping to be borne away to some better place

Deep in the starry heart of Old Mother Space.

And now they are gone forever,

As the comet too, soon will be gone,

And we will be none the wiser;

Although I too am aiming for the stars

And hoping for a miracle of love,

As we hold this high, winding highway

Between bright lights below and above,

Trying for the motherhood of mystery

Along a dark, forbidding road of history

Which always leads right back

Here to you and I,

But can vanish like comets or Californians

In the blinking of an eye.

( C. IGR 1999)

We were in Yorkshire driving in the dales one night – or rather my daughter, Ramona was because neither Lise nor I drive – and the Hale Bopp comet was spectacularly visible. The news of the cult suicides had broken that day. The experience somehow made me ponder the uncertainties of marriage and parenthood in particular and life and death in general. 

The northern lights in the picture (taken in Alaska, courtesy Google Images) are far more northern than the Huddersfield panorama that provided the backdrop to the poem, but it’s the most approximate to the scene I remember.