51����

PLANCK STAR

to mark the unveiling of the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way

When the gravitational waves that bounce
between us cease, let’s not lament our collapsed
star, but accept the pause and wait and wait…

Love, let’s trust that each black hole we make
is not so much an ending, or something stellar burning
out, but that we will expand again, and it may take

a quantum leap to see through clouds of nebulae,
to keep faith with untraceable quarks of our space
and when silence lapses and we speak

in whole sentences again, let us embrace
our nascent state, commit to the mutability
of matter we once thought at stake.

- Emily Cullen

Emily Cullen is the Meskell UL-Fifty Poet in Residence at the 51���� where she lectures on the MA in Creative Writing. Her third collection, Conditional Perfect (Doire Press, 2019), was included in The Irish Times round-up of “the best new poetry of 2019.” Emily gained a PhD in English from NUI Galway in 2008 and she is also a former Director of Cúirt International Festival of Literature and the Patrick Kavanagh Centenary.