Ben Kim asked me to write a poem about the star Antares, because it is 800 times the size of our own sun. That is, actually, pretty mind boggling. If it were in the place of our sun, it’s outer edge would be somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. We’d be toast. So, anyway, here is the poem:
Antares
There are dust specks
There are asteroids
And comets made of snow
There are moons
and there are planets
There are balls of gas which glow
Antares is the Bright Star in the Middle of the Scorpion's Back
At the center of each solar system
There is only one
A nuclear reactor called a sun
About 400 billion, throughout our galaxy
Some are bigger, some are smaller
Because how else could it be?
Like the words within a language
Like the movements in a dance
Like the moves within a chess game
Like the animals and plants
As time and space are infinite
Why should it seem so strange
That there’s an infinite variety in the range?
O.K., Ben (and anybody else, feel free to jump in here) time for a new topic. I am, for the moment, burned out on astronomy and the insignificance of mankind in this vast universe. Something lighter, maybe.
Also, if any of you poets out there know how to do that thingie where you post the poem to facebook and there’s lots of white space above but then you see the poem without breaks, and you can explain that to me like I’m 4 years old, I’d appreciate it. I’d like to know how to do that, because I don’t always want to use the blog for poetry (sometimes, sure, why not?) and if I try to post a poem as a status update, it has to be a super short poem.
Thanks.
www.gurukalehuru.com 
The poems in my son’s tribute that did turn out as they should on Facebook, breaking where they should, were the ones I lifted…copied and pasted above pictures I posted, and they came out as they appeared from the Google website where I located them…done professionally by someone else. Each time I post something like that I never know what I am going to get…I just keep redoing it, retyping it, etc.