Tim Carmichael Poet Free verse

The Indifferent Colossus

They gave the thunder to a lesser god,
a bearded man who hurled his bolts in rage
and made of lightning some dramatic show,
but Jupiter was never so small a thing.
Before the Romans claimed you for their king,
you turned without them. Long before their wars,
their olive trees, their Senate, and their gods,
you gathered all that cloud and made it yours.
You are the oldest argument in the sky,
the one that almost won. Had you grown just
a little heavier in those first cold years,
you might have lit, and we'd have lived in twice-sunned dust.
Instead you chose, if planets choose, to spin
in your own latitudes of rust and cream,
to wear your storm like a Victorian brooch,
that ancient eye older than our dream.
Four hundred years we've watched that single gale,
unchanged, unceasing, wide as worlds are wide,
a hurricane that has no shore to break against,
no coast to soften it, no tide.
What does it mean to rage without an end?
To turn for centuries and never slow?
The Earth has grief that passes. Ours conclude.
But you contain a sorrow we don't know.
Your moons are almost planets in their own right,
Io burning, Europa locked in ice,
Ganymede so large it strains the definition,
Callisto cratered past the edge of price.
You hold them all. You hold the whole middle distance.
Your gravity a moat, a catcher's mitt,
that draws the wandering stones away from birth.
How many strikes have you absorbed for us?
How many rocks consumed in our defense
that might have found us in our soft beginning
and left the whole interior world entombed?
We do not thank the things that silently save us.
We never see the accident that missed,
the rock that curved away into your keeping,
the history of all that might exist.
You owe us nothing. You were never kind.
Your mercy is a math, a mindless tending,
the accident of mass and of combined
trajectories and forces old as chaos,
as old as dust that sorted into spheres.
You did not love us. You were simply there,
and we were simply lucky. All these years.
So here is what I offer to the giant,
the one that wears the storm-cloud like a crown:
not worship, and not fear, but something stranger,
the gratitude of those you never let down,
who walk beneath a single unscorched sun
because your orbit fell the way it did,
who live inside a debt forever hid.
Turn on, great planet. Wear your banded colors.
Let your four moons run their ancient rings.
You do not need our watching to continue.
You were immense before we knew such things.

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