Entropy

In junior school there was a book
that showed legionnaires
filing onto ships for their return to Rome,
deserting us to save their own far away homes.
I saw myself as the boy in the foreground
anxiously watching their departure.
We knew the story: Saxon and Angle raids
to destroy every treasured thing,
probably mixed them up with the Vikings
maiming and burning and raping,
to leave nothing safe or the same.

Now I repeatedly ponder and worry
about the galaxies spinning apart
and the gradual extinction of stars:
that dissolving of structure and order
by the simple arrow built into all things.
By then, of course, there will be no one to see
all the light slowly snuffed out,
no one to say at the end
that enough has been enough.


Peter Keeble