Celestial Creations Poem by Harley White

As stipple of stars ornaments the night sphere
we flee above troublesome worries' frontier,
up, up and away in fantastical flights
to peer at creations in grand cosmic heights,

perhaps take a voyage to chimeral place
where Gulliver might have adventured in space
or new planet playgrounds with big enough moons
for rapturous realms with sapphiric lagoons.

Remarkable missions have given us scenes
of worlds beyond worlds via scopic machines,
such distant domains as to stymie our sense
of whither or whence in the boundless immense.

Some gaze at the images Hubble bestows
and wonder at wonderments camera shows
like nebulae painted with swatches of hue
which pass through the heavens in stellar review

midst eons of intergalactic caprice,
for instance the one in the blues of Matisse
that's pictured within a sidereal field
by Hubble, our window celestial, revealed.

Four filters for various wavelengths assigned
to different tints the portrayal refined
depicting the tableau in Scorpius found
with nebula type planetary, once bound

together in oblate shell layers quite tight
from star at its center, thus bringing to light
how elements from interactions embark,
distinctly seen in asymmetrical arc,

by stellary body in middle produced,
through medium in between systems to boost
galactic enrichment with gas and dust crux
for afterward astral formation in flux.

The Hubble has mirrors that make the light bounce
from one to another then rebound to pounce,
as happens in pinball, through hole in the glass
in main mirror's center so light ray will pass

to instruments waiting to focus the beam
made dinner plate sized concentrated in gleam.
Hence first mirror concave to convex reflects
then back to the front for analysis checks

per science devices designed for the task
to myriad cosmic enigmas unmask
unfurling for earthlings environs afar
which hint at reality's great repertoire,

huge ‘picturesque' vistas by dreamers extolled,
although the word's meaning to scholars of old
was linked with the beautiful and the sublime
both thought of as rational in former time.

This earlier gist Thomas Gray had conveyed
in speaking of ‘Claude glass' in dark blackish shade.
Indeed there were those in the arts who would choose
when viewing a landscape that gadget to use.

The artist Matisse has provided a clue
on how he created his famed ‘Window Blue',
for down near right corner in canvas is said
to be a Claude mirror in frame painted red.

Tangential reflections have brought us back home
in vast multiverse to our bubble of foam.
We're merely caretakers supposedly so
as mortal inhabitants who come and go.

It's here we must test our existence's worth
where greed and ambition rule doings on earth;
yet Thomas Gray stated in warning he gave
that all ‘paths of glory lead but to the grave'.