Size Matters Poem by Tony Jolley

Size matters –
Doesn't it just…

Not the hoary old joke
About how many inches of English oak
A man's member must be to make a maid happy,
But size of an altogether more cosmic proportion...

Saw a shot from the Hubble Space Telescope
[After the astronaut-ophthalmologists had fitted
Its new prescription lenses]:
A cluster of five, stunningly-beautiful galaxies
Some 260 million light-years away
And maybe hundreds of light-years across...
And all that ineffable glory named after one human:
One 'Stephan'.

'Stephan Who? ' I thought;
Who can possibly rate such an outsize accolade?
Général de Gaulle has a street named after him
In just about every town in France;
Robin Hood gets countless cafés and a Kevin Costner film
[The one without 'tights' in the title
But with the Bryan Adams/Michael Kamen anthem];
Nelson gets a column – though I guess he'd have settled for
Another night with Lady Hamilton;
Wellington, remembered not for Napoleon's defeat,
But for rubber galoshes made for de feet.

So who is this 'Stephan'
With more Milky Ways to his name than Cadbury's....?
Who knows – surely someone does?

But here's a thought –
Maybe [just maybe],
On an insignificant planet
Circling and equally insignificant sun
Somewhere in a quiet backwater of one of Stephan's Five Galaxies
There's intelligent life...
No, really intelligent life – not like here;
And maybe they've got their own Hubble aimed at us:
A pretty, faint nano-pixel lost in the 'Kevin Cluster'.
And maybe that eponymous Kevin:
Is the boyfriend of the girl astronomer who discovered us
As a smudge on her lens;
An inter-planetary, rock-guitar superstar
Hero-worshipped in as many languages as there are suns in the system,
Or a quiet, unassuming poet who speaks to the heart.
Maybe all of the above...
It figures:
In space, there's a hell of a lot of 'above'....