Classic Poem

If it takes almost a million years
for light from Andromeda
to reach a learned society
and stars sometimes explode
on the astronomer's time scale

and in another hundred million years
we shall be able to see
Maffei I, described as " a nearby
island universe, "

then there is passion
in the lightness of a feather,
man can hear
his arteries hardening
and the realist must pass
first through the eye of abstraction.

Yet they say it is so.