Lyri Ahnam
Singularity Storm
Dance a spiral of stars
to the galaxy’s black
hurricane heart.
At the dense void, stretch and compress
in gravity’s strain, listening
for a celestial symphony.
No angel harpists strum
infinity hymns
from the tempest’s core.
Instead ancient radio waves
wobble and boom
a once-familiar song.
Fall
fall
fall into the burning ring of fire—
Burn ~quick-blink~ slow
into everlasting echo.
_______________
Lyri Ahnam is a Rhysling-nominated poet and storyspinner writing from the ancestral lands of the Illiniwek in southern Illinois. Her poems have been published in Silver Blade and Eternal Haunted Summer. As you read this, she is likely tormenting her family by singing Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.” Incessantly. Read more of her poetry at LyriAhnam.com.
Author’s Notes and Backstory: Several creative impulses birthed this poem: my fascination with repeating patterns in nature, namely spiraling hurricanes and galaxies, the fact that black holes “sing,” and musica universalis (music of the spheres), which suggests that celestial bodies move in a form of divine music. Johannes Kepler imagined this universal music as an inaudible harmony intuited by the soul.
“Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash accompanied me through the poem, and I have no doubt that if my consciousness survived the super-massive gravity of the black hole in the center of our galaxy, that’s the song I’d be singing through the time dilation.
Editor’s Comments and Image Citations: The still taken from the animation is seen here: https://www.space.com/monster-black-holes-dance-spitzer-telescope-discovery.html inside the article “Flashy ‘dance’ of two monster black holes captured by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.” The Galaxy OJ 287 has a supermassive black hole whose mass is 18 billion times the mass of our sun (the Milky Way has a central black hole of about 4 million solar masses). You can see the gravitational lensing of another supermassive black hole (150 million times the mass of our sun) that is in a “spirogyra” dance around it. In the animation, every 12 years, the smaller black hole plunges through the huge galactic disc of dust and stars that flares a brightness greater than that of a trillion stars. Each cycle getting closer to the merger. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
