Best Spacetime Poems
Two black holes spiraled,
their dance
sent ripples
through the universe –
racing at speed of light
waves
warp spacetime.
A billion years later,
on a small planet,
laser beams zoom between mirrors,
capture the echo.
Einstein’s heirs
decode
the message.
10/3/2017
In honor of the scientists and engineers who contributed to the discovery of gravitational waves which was honored with the Nobel Prize in physics today
Categories:
spacetime, nature, science,
Form:
Free verse
Our bodies are made from stars,
The lustrous sanguinity of speckled nocturne,
The dispelled chemistry of supernovas.
Trillions of years old,
Trillions of miles traveling,
We are children of spacetime.
Our bodies are made from stars,
Our psyche emerged like fire
From star formulas of life’s order.
Spontaneous beings,
We always were and will be.
Our bodies are made from stars,
Any omnipresent maker certainly expected
Our rollout in animated evolution,
And positioned us opposing
The universal drift toward chaos.
But assembled with molecules,
What then is our place in the universe?
Our bodies are made from stars.
Categories:
spacetime, creation, god, humanity, life,
Form:
Free verse
What if all was one?
What if the many were merely reflections
Of a single thread,
Looping through the fabric of time?
What if time flows not just forward,
But back—
A river branching,
Yet always meeting itself?
Worldlines traced across spacetime,
Every particle, every moment,
A point on an infinite knot.
Are we watching one dance
Through infinite shadows?
Fractals of leaves like trees,
Swarms of birds and fish,
Herds of elk and bison—
A fractal curve repeating endlessly.
Was it all by chance?
Or is it connected?
Are we not one?
What is alignment, if not one?
In every atom, every spark,
Do we find a reflection of ourselves?
Electrons moving forward,
Backward,
Through a sea of possibility—
Do we chase them,
Or are they chasing us?
What if a positron is not born,
But remembered—
An echo of an electron
Returning from tomorrow?
What if Wheeler was right?
What if Feynman saw the truth
In a worldline bent like light,
A single traveler crisscrossing time?
Are these fragments
Not pieces of the same whole?
And what of us?
Billions of worlds, billions of hearts,
Each thinking itself separate,
Yet all drawn from the same source.
Is alignment not the symmetry of being?
Is being not the proof of one?
When we look into the stars,
Do we see them,
Or the reflection of our own worldline,
Stretching through the void?
What if the universe is not many,
But one—
Tracing itself endlessly?
And what if we are not the observers,
But the observed?
Categories:
spacetime, art,
Form:
Free verse
Written: July 18, 2025, for contest Sponsored by: Tom Woody
Walking around the edge of a massive crater that seemed to beckon her with all sorts of bizarre things, Alice—now an adult but still not quite—felt a strong pull. She still had an insatiable need to travel, even if it had been a long time since she had done things such as dancing with white rabbits or drinking morning tea. She discovered a mirror encircled by shimmering stardust while searching the enigmatic Moonrock for indications of madness.
The mirror flickered and changed, as a beauteous glass serpent, opening doors to wormholes from another galaxy. She touched its surface with her fingertips, but they went right through it like it was liquid light. The aromas of cardamom oil and starlight were so powerful that they flooded her whole body. It was an amalgam that savored such as the core of time. Her body parts swayed and twirled bizarrely, as she was in an intense nightmare. The nebulae above laughed with joy as they opened up. Comets spun around a celestial chessboard, making a symphony of clicks that echoed through the universe.
Alice traveled through planets ruled by quantum queens. Their eyes were as deep as black holes, and their lips formed the language of math. A drink infused with the essence of auburn was handed to her, while another crafted melody defied convention and pushed boundaries. The atmosphere in the room was warm and inviting, reminiscent of an expanded Wonderland, now adorned with an enchanting layer of twinkling stars.
She met a dark matter cat along the way. Its smile had the power to break apart galaxies. "Tell me," Alice asked as she drank the delicious essence of entropy, "is this a memory or a wonder?"
The cat looked back with knowing eyes and said, "Both." We never truly depart; we only shift.
spacetime came apart
curiosity sewed string~
mirrors still call out
Categories:
spacetime, analogy, space,
Form:
Haibun
Gravity keeps our feet on the ground,
Stops us from slapdash flying around.
This force of attraction ‘fictitious’ gives weight
And makes all fall down at equivalent rate.
(Albeit in flights of fancy it seems
That gravity follows the laws of dreams.)
Relativity caused Newton’s view to shatter,
In positing spacetime to be curved by matter.
So objects will take a particular path
That must correspond with Einsteinian math.
(The upshot is bodies have odysseys
Appropriate to their geodesies.)
Gravitons, a gravitational source
Of controversy, are seen as a horse
Of a quite different color altogether.
But then scientists aren’t birds of a feather.
(Some sit upon their a priori-based fences
And come up with theories defying the senses.)
Weak or strong, short or long, what is this thing
Called gravity? Wide hypotheses swing.
There are those who suppose that it’s this, others that.
Maybe someday, they all just might have it down pat.
(Meanwhile gravity, though we resize and shape it,
Will still have its own way— for who can escape it?)
– Harley White
Categories:
spacetime, earth, math, muse, nature,
Form:
Rhyme
With a mass influx of background radiation
Strengthens the idea of a cosmic inflation
Ten seconds of magic starting with a bang
Leaves religious hearts with a heavy pang
What before was that of a mysterious bubble
Was to be unwound by the discovery of Hubble
That creation is expanding at the speed of light
Makes the naked eye struggle for a clear sight
To only that of which our minds can observe
Which some do believe is shaped in a curve
Believed before that it was in fact much flatter
For not in parallel lines can keep this dark matter
In this space appears to be no electric charge
Keeping Apollo at bay, and Armstrong at large
What conditions would allow life of intelligent form?
Or withstand heat or the sweep of a galactic storm
Into the mass amount of scientific speculation
The idea of which a metric theory of gravitation
Can imply through discovery of Einstein’s Ring
Even light from a far, will make your eyes sting
So even now we can see those many stars
And some assume we could even have life on Mars
But what about that gaping hole in the Milky Way?
That feeds on the mighty energy and light as its prey
A region of spacetime where nothing can escape
Hidden between the stars in its invisible cape
Through event horizon time ticks more slow
To truly unravel space, that we may never know
Categories:
spacetime, beautiful, creation, earth, mystery,
Form:
Ballad
The permacultural professional's definition of enculturing math:
Counting and discounting,
multiplying and dividing,
nutritional seed (capital) diverse re-investment guilds
to solve problems of cooperative wealth values
and dissonant pathological disvalues.
The bicameral geo-mathematician's bilateral dilemma:
To get from 0 to 1, (nomial stasis)
one must also get from 0 to 2, (binomial diastasis)
and perhaps best back again,
to simultaneously resolve,
yet never consecutively linear-sequence
in real natural-spiritual equivalent spacetime 4-prime dimensions
of Special Case InFormational Dynamics,
to 1 median, septic and dipolar,
with 0 before and 2 implied after,
whether positive,
or double-negative,
or, co-arising nondually,
both LeftYang (+1) and Right exformatively recessive Yin (-,-)0.
Resonant BiCameral Resolutions:
Exchange Vertical-Universal deductive/inductive interdependence,
co-relation,
co-gravity,
co-arising
with co-equivalent
Horizontal-BiLateral Left-Right
both +1 blank slate, and notnot (0)-sum interdependence,
cooperative Yang/Yin ego/ecopolitical co-redeeming resonance.
Reiteratively enthymeming
cooperatively healthy creolizing
(0)-sum WinWin Communication Intent
to extend 4Prime Basic EcoTherapeutic HealthWealth Fractals,
like our oh-so-regenerative DNA,
strings of bilateral polypathic hypostatic theory
dipolar co-arising
Gaian Integral Hypothetical
co-gravitating dualdark ZeroSum
regenerating prime 4-Base
nurturing/strong reiterating root systems
of regenerating Positive/NotNotNegative
double-binding
self/other perpetuating
ego/ecosystems
echoing convex stems
of bilateral concave dipolar strings....
Categories:
spacetime, culture, humor, math, philosophy,
Form:
Prose Poetry
Wonders of the world abound
on our earthly stomping ground,
in the seven seas profound,
midst the heavens round us wound.
Images from reaches vast
by astronomers amassed
show in varicolored cast,
cosmic glories unsurpassed,
stories of the great immense,
begging questions why and whence,
scenes stelliferously dense,
bringing past to present tense.
Oh how tantalizing to
lose oneself in starry view
of galactic vision new
where a poet’s words ring true!
Tennyson’s ‘Far--Far—Away’,
penned for Music’s haunting play
with the sounds the words convey
as they whisper, swing and sway,
tells of ‘far’ from past long gone,
murmur from ‘his own life’s dawn’?
breath where ‘doors of death’ go on
through an open curtain drawn?
Whether time or space be meant,
or spacetime together bent,
still, whatever sense is lent,
far’s remote in its intent.
After sunset’s crimson blaze
we may raise a dreamy gaze
in escape from troubled days
to celestial splendors praise.
Will our search of cosmic sphere
teach us to esteem what’s here?
Oft stargazers too I fear
must look far to see the near.
~ Harley White
Categories:
spacetime, earth, fantasy, imagery, poetry,
Form:
Verse
Why are we the human race
rather than another extinguishing species?
Why not the human species
and not the cockroach race?
Why is human nature
intended as somehow supremely natural
not within but faster than,
above and beyond
inferior sensual nature?
Why is race,
inhuman embrace-conflicted context,
a qualitative noun,
stultifying stasis,
rather than a speeding verb
toward shared finish line
when everyone can win together
where no one fully wins apart?
Why is nature's race
not yet declared as one
indigenous Earth Tribe?
Bicamerally endowed
to celebrate Earth's rhythmic ordination
of regenetic liturgy and syntax,
grace racing veins
full-blooded diverse healing homes
of natural peace construction.
What happened to issue
as primal verb
when babies issued from progenitors
and words issued from mouths
and blood issued from wounds
and racing issued from DNA's polycultures,
storytellers weaving diverse generative threads
Remembering from whom and when we issue
back before embracing human memory
in dialectic dreamy nest of fractal tones
polychronic texture
4 dimensioned structure
rhythm rhyme dancing
polycultured racing
comic multicultural
co-operative opera.
Coincidental correlating races,
humane natural places,
issue forth to teach and humor
and recess back to learn and decompose
to mentor Nature's human embrace
radical solidarity race
rooted pace
secured by leaving none behind
Every living system ordained
to race redeeming issues
through singing flows of dancing waves
linked through all spacetime.
If race exponentially regenerates
intergenetic issues,
then this is more of a species relay race
during which boundary lanes
no more than trace and lace
our deep seasoned swimming synchrony,
blending genetic notes of freedom's harmony
toward nature's unfinish-lined
circling symphony.
Categories:
spacetime, america, peace, race, racism,
Form:
Free verse
On life's easyrider days and nights
love plays a romping game.
On those more oppositionally challenging days,
and long anxious nights,
love is a hunt,
sometimes a passionate hunt,
special occasionally a compassionate hunt,
a mutual hunt
for truth about who is hunter
and who is hunted
and why
and when
and how do these co-arising functions transcend "or"
to gracefully meet in "and."
This primal function of love's synergetic force
hunts
like gravity.
Both parties,
all living entities,
hunt,
gravitate,
even those feeling hunted
haunted
stalked
fearful and anxious
competitively and unilaterally,
often in silos threatening despair.
We all search frantically for safe havens,
hidden from those hunting for our very self-identity,
our life,
or at least so it feels during those dissonant times.
What is a redemptive optimization strategy
for those hunting safe havens from death,
pursued by tyrannical lovers,
ego-identified life-sucking hunters?
When is it not an appropriate moment
to love the hunter,
the hunted,
and the hunt?
Is there a significant difference
between the romping love of fluid smooth days and nights
and the more strategic
logistical
personal
intimately co-prehensile
hunt for love transcending Ego-incarnate death?
Too seldom haunted hunted entities,
primally assuming cooperative investment
in our challenging rampant race
and pace of EarthTribal systems,
when a passionate challenge exhausts our smooth-skinned body,
and/or brain,
the hunted redemptively turn toward other hunters,
gratefully and mindfully inviting a wrestling-with match,
setting aside a wrestling-against death and fear match,
comprehending that compassioning our hunting love
always optimizes EarthTribe's regenerational future.
In love,
sometimes,
at least once,
it is my time to love loss,
to forgive away space and or time,
to redeem future spacetime
equivalently invested in me
birthing my original praxis of conception
as mutual reception--
eco-harmonic redemption.
Categories:
spacetime, death, life, love,
Form:
Free verse
Dear EcoYin,
did Freud know you as SuperEgo,
while others have know you as Mythic Wisdom
Holy Spirit of Sacred Synergy,
elationally TransParent
PresentPresence?
Dear EgoYang,
are you the dipolar co-arising side of
unitarian intuition
with all the language skills?
Would that not leave you
reductive dominant focus
on Left's deductive resolutions?
Blindly angry past synaptic feelings
fueling fear of future death
as (-,-) polyvagal
LoseLose neurosystemic scenarios?
Well yes Dear Yang/Yin exponential wisdom.
Together we regenerate confluency, resonance
and cognitive-affective dissonance
through our co-arising bicameral mindbody
co-mentoring communications.
We so love to grow our mutuality.
This co-passionate pleasure
going back through iconic uracil with cytosine
toward time function as spacetime's 4D emergence
from timeless elational
dialectical eco-gravitating eternity
toward which each Loving PresentPresence
co-arisingly (0)-soul resonates
EgoYang with EcoYin
Left/Right MindBody
Love as positive sponge
absorbing angry fears of ego's
environmental dissonance
negative despairing conclusions
as not-yet-fully comprehensive ego/ecoconsciousness
of Present-CoPresence.
YangYin temporal spacetime balance
researching deductively-informing mindbody neurosystems
to regenerate our inductive bodymind ego/eco-binomial
universally interdependent PresentPresence CoMemory
of SpaceTime's ReVolutionary Great UnFolding Moments
dancing humane egostar
creation divine story songs,
each a holonic piece of time's polycultural
polypathic
polyvagal
polytheistic
great Pre/Post
Crown through Root
UnFolding Story.
There is something about DNA syntaxed regenerative memory
that is Earth-erotic/exotic,
not in a nasty incestuous way
but more of a warm bicameral baptismal
health and safe wealth
mindbody nondualistic
present/Mind/presenceBody wu-way
of co-passionately pleasured
EarthTribe Win/Win Peace.
Categories:
spacetime, appreciation, body, earth, light,
Form:
Parallelismus Membrorum
When the Moon moves between the Earth and Sun
then comes a rare happening that can stun,
above all a syzygy alliance,
the term from the Greek in astro-science.
Once solar eclipses in history
were viewed as a frightening mystery.
Cultural superstitions abounded
as rumors spread far and wide unfounded.
Many imagined the light was devoured
by dragons or beasts super empowered.
Herodotus wrote of one that brought peace
and made warring factions their battle cease.
The Chinese of old took drastic measures
against stargazers for drunken pleasures
that altered their senses though being skilled;
hence they failed in prediction and were killed.
A poem was penned to commemorate
the court officials’ miserable fate,
which stated, ‘though sad, it was risible
that they could not spy the invisible’.
The death of England’s King Henry the first
prompted the notion of omens accursed
for rulers; ‘twas just after one had passed
described as that “hideous darkness” vast.
There are tales and legends to tell galore.
But later on, researchers learned much more.
Curiously, helium was revealed
because of our star’s disk being concealed.
Yet the one that is “most important” called,
made Einstein famous, and left him enthralled,
was the shadowing of nineteen nineteen
when theory entered the proven scene.
Eddington relativity tested—
which to this day has never been bested
as general cosmic model supreme—
showing warped spacetime through bent starlight scheme.
In the total umbra it’s black as night
till the exiting shroud sets the Sol right.
At starting and finish as it proceeds
occurs the spectacle of Baily’s beads
with a ‘diamond ring’ that’s an extra boon
resulting from the terrain of the moon;
thereupon that stellar phenomenon
is gone, though its memory lingers on.
Thus, solar eclipses provide a chance
to astronomical knowledge advance
as well as to witness a great event,
one that is literally heaven-sent!
Then it’s back to our grinds and muddled minds
wherever our personal path unwinds…
~ Harley White
* * * * * * * * *
Poem composed for the occasion of the total solar eclipse on Monday, August 21,2017…
Categories:
spacetime, earth, humanity, moon, science,
Form:
Verse
I am content to walk alone,
but to walk in company with others
adds vigor and passion to the journey.
Rumi
Good Taoists,
although I am not sure I actually know any,
refine their inclusively subordinate clauses,
and sentences,
and contracts,
and lives
Define eternally and mutually satisfactory gratitude,
anthrosupremely alone
LeftBrain dominantly apart
We camouflage EarthTribe's cooperative ecological praxis
producing win/win healthy outcomes
consistent with multicultural peak experience research
within human natural systems
Analogically synthesizing sacred principles of Earth's nature,
Her natural flow and spirited functions
Her decay and lifeless dysfunction;
like post-millennial PermaCulturalists.
But, Western Monotheistic Cultures
prefer more compassionate vigor in our strut
through this divinely manifest live-system
we inherited from Indigenous Elders past,
comparatively short-sighted
about EarthMother's healthy global future.
All newborns are experiential researchers of balance,
symmetry,
flow and rhythm,
form and beauty,
capacity and lack thereof,
time's sufficiency and spatial synergy,
and lack thereof.
Human children also evolve as recreative muses
of color, shape, paradigms, stories,
rhythms of patterned confluence,
and denigrated dissonance.
We can,
Taoist or not,
child or not,
use dissonance to show us our way
toward appositional confluence.
We are each compelled to survive,
and sometimes togathering thrive,
in this Tao way,
within double-boundaries of systemic spacetime trauma
and therapeutic imagination,
rooted in regenetic memory.
Imaginations grow intuitively fueled,
empathic powered,
passioned,
vigorous,
with polysystemic comprehension of Prime Relationship
P-Yang=NP-YinYin,
binomial win/win thermodynamic balance,
as +1 = -(-0)
co-binary eco-empathic.
Cooperative economic polycultural balance,
exploring inclusive oppositional subsidiarity
to optimize EarthDay's slow-growth atmosphere
as one EarthTribe Community,
both compassionate,
and, hopefully, still content
with being less lonely
hiding behind all our LeftBrain dominant
verbal camouflage.
Categories:
spacetime, appreciation, conflict, creation, culture,
Form:
Free verse
her of a soul
him to a body
living in the mind
thereby the I drama
where the Me negates death
praying a spacetime
on point One of Paris
Categories:
spacetime, dark, innocence, life, paris,
Form:
Free verse
Memory of past,
imagination of mirrored future,
evolve dipolar octaves of functional form,
informating appositional contention,
encoded, and therefore neurally decoding,
recoding
reconnecting from past to future to past regenerators
implicate ordered language and iconic relationships,
numeric transliterations across universal paradigms,
transformatively intuited,
transubstantiated semiotics,
transductive integrity of right and left ellipticals
eco-metaphysical and ego-physical fractalfunction
mind/body interweaving
multisystemic regenesis
of full hued harmonies
and curious orthopracticing temperaments,
Redeeming peace,
time as reiteratively co-arising mindfulness,
eco-ethics as co-incidentally mentoring evolution,
ecologic as logos moral syntax,
economics as normative co-investment order,
eco/ego-entifying as bilateral Earth Justice
Echoing resonance
informing dipolar functions
filling balanced forming farms
growing Yintegral empowerment
with radiant Yang enlightenment
Not Polynomial double-negative boundaries
and margins
balancing poly-binomial (1/0) spacetime,
double-bound temporal-aptic neural strings,
never too late or early,
of resonant holonic calculation,
rational trigonomials,
fractally revolving geometrics,
permaculturing square-emergent roots
resonating Life's reverse-hierarchic
exponential Win-Win Tree.
Eco-nutritional revolving roots
of power
produce Earth's rainbowed metric rhythms,
branching eco-nutritional harmonic crowns
of light.
Categories:
spacetime, beauty, color, earth, math,
Form:
Free verse