From the Flaming Skull Nebula, Oct 31st 2014

Susan Taylor

Hardly surprising I’m burning up,
I’m 45,000 years old
and I have begun to die.

Can you imagine me
letting go of an existence
shaped as a Yaga curse?

I flame like a crème brûlée
from jaw to occipital bone, streaking
through the serpent’s tail.

My scream is a blue emission
moving at two thousand kilometres
per second on the galactic road.

What is left is mainly gaping
mouth, gulping the sheer cobalt
energy of oxygen.

Time has made me radiant, ultra-violet,
though dim to your foxiest telescopes
at my 1,000 light years distance.

Real time intervention

News breaks on the side of your screen –
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo
explodes mid-flight this Hallowe’en.

The Science

'From the Flaming Skull Nebula' was prompted by the extraordinary vision which astrophotography gives us into the cosmos. I have spent hours on screen, gazing at photographs of nebulae by the UK astrophotographer, Chris Baker. His images are equally as stunning as NASA's own. I used facts and figures released by NASA to get distance and speed into the poem.

The Poet

Susan Taylor is a UK poet who lives on Dartmoor. She began writing in her teens in the idyllic setting of her family farm in the Lincolnshire Wolds. An ex-shepherd, she’s a turncoat now, with much sympathy for the plight of the wild wolf. She has eight published poetry collections and is a keen performer, with many poetry shows to her name, including La Loba Enchanting the Wolf and The Weather House, which appeared as an Indigo Dreams Poetry Pamphlet in 2017. You can find her at www.susantaylor.co.uk