Under The Turning Stars

Something turns under these turning stars that turns then into here and now and then turns here and now into then and gone, while we stand looking up at stars we cannot touch, at moments long before we could reach out, flickering forever beyond us. It is easy to feel small against such a large sky that moves around us and still feel at the centre of something. Once we created gods to turn the skies around us because it seemed the stars were put there for us.

Now we know better, but still something pulls for the hand of a father on the shoulder as we look up, to explain what we see in the language of civilisation’s childhoods.

Now, though, we are alone and grown beyond the false comfort of the gods we created. They cannot help us now, only hold us back, like that parent who will not let go of the child’s hand, even though the child has grown beyond such things.

Sometimes, it seems we should mourn the passing of the gods, but they were never really our true parents, merely a way of interpreting a world that seemed far too big for us to hold onto without someone there to guide us. We should have let them go a long time ago and never bothered to look back to see if we could catch a glimpse of their shadows in the light cast from those far too distant stars.