Spheres | The Quarantine Poems

The Quarantine Poems is a series of poetry written during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, available in text and in audio.

The fourth instalment, Spheres, is authored by Liam Atterbury.

---

Spheres

Did you know the world is still alive?
Like the viral stars that web the skies,
mapped across the dark like thrumming veins
and bleeding out into celestial stains. 

Did you realise they feel pain and fear?
Such is the lot of the thinking sphere;
its skin can feel everything that pinches,
its fragile heart is a game of inches:
it feels for those who leave, and those who enter;
all points equidistant from its centre.

 Its shape perfect, it moves perfectly too:
akin to every star and every moon –
not one single of their orbits vary,
how could their movements be involuntary? 

They look out, into the open sky,
and we note galaxies with naked eye;
some say their movements constitute our nature;
cOncentric circles fOrge Our nOmenclature;
spheres in our head can feel through thigmotaxis
and, like the earth, stray not from their axis. 

The spheres discern all that is affixed.
All ellipticals become eclipsed.
In specks of light tiny spheres are wrought
into the firmament to then be caught. 

Into our mantle, our kin traverse
the inner sanctum of the universe,
moving, like those above the ocean,
around in circumferential motion,
and to our lungs inevitably hurtle,
as life is pumped in one unceasing circle.

 The battle of the spheres, a war eternal,
now fought upon the plains of the internal. 

The moon begins to blot the sun-lit sky;
one sphere will prevail, and one will die.