Shut Eye Poem by Tony Jolley

Eyelids shut.
Paltry protection
Against the teeming billions of high-energy photons –
Those rejected scion
Of the atomic anger
Of the First Lord of Fusion,
Ejecta of his immutable law
Of neuclear reaction.

Barely eight minutes
And ninety-eight million miles after their creation,
At the envelope-edge limit of Einstein’s Constant
And what God (that well-known non dice-player) will condone,
Those estranged sons of Sun
Smash into my flesh
Bleeding a raw, raging crimson curtain
Across my vision.
Strange shapes:
Dark-dot islets
Tossed and tormented
Upon waves and cascades of corpuscular lava
Surging and seething across my sight
Like Odysseus at the mercy
Of Poseidon and Aeolus,
Running the gauntlet of Scylla and Charibdis.

Strange….
Eyelids shut
Yet still I can see,
But were I to open them
Then blinded I’d be.