GAS Featured Poet: Wim Coleman

Wim Coleman is a playwright, poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer. His book of poetry, I.O.U., was published in 2020. His narrative poem The King and the Beggar Lady was published in 2022. Novels that he has co-authored with his wife, Pat Perrin, include Anna’s World, the Silver Medalist in the 2008 Moonbeam Awards, and The Jamais Vu Papers, a 2011 finalist for the Eric Hoffer/Montaigne Medal. Two collections of his one-act plays are currently in print, and his plays have appeared in anthologies along with works by authors ranging from Molière to David Mamet. blog site: https://playsonideas.com/

Beacon

 

They say you can see 

futility from space—

the flickering 

bioluminescent SOS 

of a solitary storm cloud

bursting over 

an infinite ocean.

 

 

To Look at a Partial Solar Eclipse

 

don’t turn to the sky 

with glasses prudently opaque

but down

with rapt capitulation

and the naked lucidity of eyes 

down

where the silence burgeons and swarms 

in phosphorescent shards

down

where a million little crescent suns

nestle among the shadows of leaves.

 

 

Singularity

 

This is the moment of the Big Bang

no need to look back for it

 

This will be a short-lived universe

a few seconds at most 

 

and the space it takes up is only and fully 

a metaphor

 

What happened a micro-fraction of a nanosecond ago 

is one of the great mysteries of physics 

 

and what happens next is

the inflation of selfhood

 

looking around and scratching its nebulae

and asking What am I but

 

bundles of dying neural

filaments of firmament

 

rattling loose in a light-cone 

too tiny and brief

for angels or apes to get inside

and make themselves at home

 

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