The Virgo Collaboration
…scientists announced that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away…the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago…vibrated a pair of antennas in Washington State and Louisiana…
–New York Times, 2/11/16
The second largest constellation, a maiden
holding a grain of wheat, the bright star
Spica, and the binary star Porrima, goddess
of the future, sister of Postverta:
Virgo, goddess of purity, of the Virginid
showers, last of the ancient ones to live
with humans in the Silver Age, the other
immortals fled the wickedness of our iron
ascended to heaven where time space warped,
a disturbance in the cosmos formed waves
spreading outward, a collision of neutron
stars producing gamma rays like sound
moving sideways. Milton wrote that God
hung his golden scales between Astraea,
this innocent maiden and the Scorpion
and weighed the Earth and Air, pondered
our battles and realms. Now the receptors
have vibrated, our place in the universe
altered forever, science reveals us as small
creatures unattuned to cosmic disturbances,
this pure energy, reality’s deepest register,
the resulting black hole an exit door
of the universe where anything that passes
can never return, as the gods abandoned us
to our iron battles, our astral light as they
receded to eternal darkness, gravity waves
still not come ashore, Virgo still hanging
across our sky with her one bright star.
Emily Strauss has an M.A. in English, but is self-taught in poetry, which she has written since college. Over 300 of her poems appear in a wide variety of online venues and in anthologies, in the U.S. and abroad. She is both a Best of the Net and Pushcart nominee. The natural world of the American West is generally her framework; she also considers the narratives of people and places around her. She is a semi-retired teacher living in California.