d.a. pratt | yes, the earth moved …

Yes, the earth moved …

The beginning of another new calendar year –
we’re now nicely into the second decade
of the twenty-first century, with the stupidity
about when the century really began now
beginning to recede from my memory …
As midnight struck, wherever you were, whatever
you were doing, did you feel the earth move?

And, actually, it did … in its myriad of ways …
of course, we know it’s silently spinning around
its tilted axis, doing this for all of us once a day,
and it’s continuing without candid commentary
on its annual orbit around the sun, our star …
there are nuanced signs of this but nothing
like the dawning of each morning and the daily
progress toward the darkness of the nights …
many of us depend on the change of seasons
while others of us simply keep track of them
for various reasons that are important to us
but unimportant to everyone else …

What we do not sense is the speed of the planet
hurtling through space, moving with our star
within our galaxy, the Milky Way … nor do we
perceive how fast the galaxy itself is moving
within the universe as a whole … however,
someone in the “world of science” has thought
about this sort of thing – and it’s far more complex
than my own thought experiments could imagine:
our star is moving, within our galaxy, toward a star
we call Lambda Herculis … and we’re going with it …
and our star is also moving upward from the plane
of the Milky Way … and we’re along for the ride …
yes, as the calendar year changed, the earth
moved … seemingly not saying anything about it …

All of this is absolutely amazing, if and when we
allow ourselves to think about this type of thing –
the size and state of the universe and
the journey of our planet is on within it …
And, in contemplating the wonder of it all,
the planet will somehow speak to us and
we will feel that, yes, the earth moved …