Birthday Song

Neutrinos--"In fact more than a billion of them passed harmlessly and

unnoticed through your body in the time it took to read this sentence."

(Science article in the Christian Science Monitor)

Saddened by the mirror's bulging shape--

sixty-odd years of flesh and bone--

weighed down by memory's backward weight

and dropping earthwards like a stone,


I think of those gay weightless things

piercing this body, as if through air,

passing through trees, earth's granite rings,

to stream off spacewards, and disappear;


and feel the lightness at matter's heart,

those empty atoms, all that space

through which suns pour through the raining dark

and never touch another face,


and see my self, this ghostly ghost

lighter than ghosts, as in a trance,

reflected in that glass world, lost

in its weightless weight, begin to dance.


Copyright 2010-2012 Paul Petrie