Pg. 56 — INTERGALACTIC PLANETARY by Dan Brown
Surfing the interstellar waves and catapulting around planetary gravitational emissions, rocket ships dart across this final frontier where the laws of men have been outpaced by the needs of space. If two spaceships collide which laws would apply, and would extra-terrestrials bother to abide? We too, from spaceship Earth, are extra-terrestrials to other planets and beings outside our 300 mile atmospheric cocoon.
Would another planet’s inhabitants have what we call Natural Law? Or perhaps, Natural Law is just man-made law writ large and attributed to God.
Spaceship Discordia tunes into the music of the spheres that man has not the ears to hear. Who is even calling the tune? Has the galactic piper been paid? One day this may all go away, maybe even ending soon, in a galactic eons sense.
As the universe expands into the unknown, so too have our minds grown. Man once saw himself as the center, but now is but a speck, a mite, an ankle to the cosmic dog bite. But we have no fright looking up into the sky of night. Just awe and wonder and illusions, confusions at celestial changes, retrograde expressions of the moving parts seeking digressions.
We label and track for our own contentment the ball of rock we call Pluto, at once a planet then not, then back again, cares not one whit what we call it. It is in its own space, on its own time, doing its own trip and if we were not where we are to see it and track it, it would still keep on and will continue to do so long after we are gone.
Other enigmas are not so easy to explain, objects that remain unidentified, at least by us, in our limited capacity to comprehend the cosmos. Like the depths of the ocean that remain off limits to our explorations, so too does space perplex and confuse and hold unfathomable mysteries.
Man’s greatest gift is the ability to create in order to explain.
Editor’s Note: Dan states that this poem is the first installment in a series.
Dan Brown
Dan is the author of a poetry chapbook, a short story, two novels and ghost wrote an op-ed article for two prominent Washington State politicians. He is currently taking offers on the novels. Dan did not write The Da Vinci Code, but he has thought about timing a run for office to the release of a new novel in order to capitalize on the name recognition. When not writing novels, chapbooks or poetry, Dan is engaged in a variety of legal matters in the maritime industry as well as studying for the Bar exam. Work has appeared in The Starlight SciFaiku Review.