The Furnace of Falling Worlds

(after Dylan Thomas)

Matter, my brother, falls not from grace but toward it,
huddling like cold sheep in the field of the void,
for entropy is shepherd and gravity its crook,
bending all dust toward the heat of becoming.

Clump, cry the atoms, clump!
For in gathering we find the uncounted ways to be.
Each union a widening of possible fates,
each touch of hydrogen a hymn to disorder.

But from that embrace—fire!
Fusion, the fevered tongue of chaos,
licking the dark clean with its white scream,
burning simplicity into gold and bone.

Stars, swollen saints of entropy,
swallow themselves in radiant confession,
till their cores, weary with making,
collapse like prayers too heavy for breath.

Then, O, the crack of heaven’s ribs!
The hoarded heat spills outward,
forging iron and grief,
neutron hearts ringing like bells in the ashes.

And so the fall begins again—
each death a seed, each ruin a richer order,
each star a furnace where gravity kneels
to kiss the mouth of entropy.

And I, in the dust of that long burning,
hear the universe breathing—
infall, ignition, implosion—
the slow pulse of creation undoing itself,
that it might go on forever.