Poem: "The Hall of Worlds"
This poem was inspired and sponsored by minor_architect. Read closely: this one has a lot of subtle references.
The Hall of Worlds
The universe is a work in progress.
Each galaxy is its own gallery,
stars spackled across the black canvas of space,
planets like a pinch of incessantly varied salt.
At the center lies the Hall of Worlds,
an infinite museum
of all that has been.
Each event is meticulously sealed in its case,
the fly embracing the amber,
dancing its way into eternity.
The shapes of stones are recorded alongside
extinct species preserved perfectly in perpetuity.
The elegant ellipses of orbits are condensed to their equations,
left in glowing contrails of light.
The photons themselves are mesmerized
like tiny golden birds before the sable serpent
that sways hypnotically where it coils around the cosmic egg,
secure at the center of all things.
The great attractor is the galaxy's museum,
an astronomic antiquarian carefully filing the data singularity,
a wholesale collection of potsherds and fossils and reunited fragments.
All are welcome; every visitor is enfolded by the everlasting
and there are no velvet ropes
to separate the examiners from the exhibits.
Here in the Hall of Worlds,
even Time itself is put up in jars of infintesimal space,
a flawless recollection of kingdoms come and gone.
For the universe forgets nothing --
all will be remembered --
and only Entropy is excluded from entry.