Three Poems by J.B. Hogan

 

Will We Never Wake

(Villanelle)

 

When darkness takes our final sight,

When all is black and black is cold;

Will we never wake from endless night?

 

Each alone must face loss of light,

And embrace the terror alone and bold;

When darkness takes our final sight.

 

Each alone feels the ebbing of their might

As we learn what could not be told;

Will we never wake from endless night?

 

Each alone through lives wrong and right,

Our final hands reveal and fold;

When darkness takes our final sight.

 

Each alone must see their plight,

As we must rot and mold;

Will we never wake from endless night?

 

All whose vision now shines bright, 

Will feel the dimming of days grown old;

When darkness takes our final sight,

Will we never wake from endless night? 

 

This Milky Spiral Above

 

This milky spiral above,

home to a billion planets,

four times as many stars,

so beautiful, dark and cold,

awesome, bright, terrifying,

just one of trillions with a billion

trillion planets more, each filled

with clusters, comets, nebulae,

size beyond telling, depth beyond measure,

overwhelming intricacy and law,

its cosmic wave over soaring at

ten trillion times the weight and power

needed, understood, to engulf the

miniscule, the infinitesimal, the

uncomprehending.

 

 

Ever Even Here

 

Did you ever smash a bug

on your wall and then

get some water and a paper

towel and wipe the remains

off the wall so that there

was nothing remaining of the

bug that had just landed on the

wall or climbed up it

looking for a safe place to

get some food or avoid a

predator or was just moving

along in its existence not

thinking about anything

just being and then in

less than a second it was

dead and there was no

trace that it had ever been on the

wall or trying to eat or live or

maybe traveling somewhere and then

just like that it was squished out of

existence and into nothingness as if

it had never been here in the first place?

Well, that’s what the universe does to us

when it smashes us against

the wall of eternity and

cleans us off and no one knows

we were ever even here.

J. B. Hogan has published over 280 stories and poems, as well as eleven books, including Bounty Riders, Bar Harbor (short fiction), Time and Time Again, Mexican Skies, Tin Hollow, Living Behind Time, Losing Cotton, The Rubicon, Fallen (short fiction), The Apostate, and Angels in the Ozarks (nonfiction, local professional baseball history). He also was a contributing researcher and writer for The Square Book (local history). He lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.