Alignment - A Poem

The comets sensed each other first as heat.

Neither by touch nor by name,

but by influence and coincidence.

They ran through the same darkness,

each carrying a private blaze,

each convinced the other was a trick of light,

a reflection thrown back by loneliness.

When they drew near, space itself seemed to thin.

Dust awoke from ancient slumber.

Ice remembered it could burn in the vacuum.

Still they did not collide, they adjusted trajectory.

Always that small, finite adjustment.

Close enough to be altered.

Never close enough claim the other.

Their orbits learned the shape of restraint.

A choreography of almost and maybe.

They passed so near that their tails braided,

two signatures written over the same silence,

then pulled away, terrified by the accuracy of the gravity.

This is how they survived.

By letting the heat speak instead of the impact.

Time, patient and incurious, kept score.

Until one night the mathematics failed.

A fraction of gravity went unanswered.

A correction arrived too late.

There was no warning worth the name.

The collision was not an explosion but a confession.

Everything they had been refusing arrived at once.

Stone met fire. Fire admitted stone.

They did not become one thing.

They became many.

Fragments flared into purpose,

each shard incandescent with the argument they never finished.

The sky over Earth filled with consequence.

A rain of burning answers.

People looked up and made wishes.

The people mistook it for beauty.

They did not know it was debris from a devotion that lasted too long to be gentle

and ended too suddenly to be kind.

By morning the comets were gone.

Only scorched air remained.

Somewhere, a field of quiet craters,

each one shaped like a word

that should have been spoken sooner,

lay as the only testimony to the collision.