Eating a Sun a Day

There was a belief lightning
Came when the door to Heaven
Cracked open for a second,

And light flashed through our dark world.
Then the door was quickly shut.
Human, of course—everything

Inhuman gets imagined
As a human behavior—
Having a home like a cave

Lit with fire on the inside,
Opening the door a crack,
All that. As long as people

Have been around and then some,
There’s been a star in the sky,
Just a star, that wasn’t one.

Turns out it was a quasar
All along, most luminous
Object ever detected,

Staggeringly far away,
Its core a black hole the mass
Of seventeen billion suns,

Eating mass equivalent
To another sun a day,
Not that a black hole has days,

But, you know, human again.
Every time the Earth spins once,
Another sun is eaten.

Let’s say the quasar’s Heaven,
Angels always falling in,
Blazing door hanging open.