The Star Is Not the Tenor

Astronomers and astronomy

Buffs are fond of assigning nicknames

To interstellar phenomena,

Most often based on faint resemblance

Of a pattern to some well-known thing

From human experience on Earth,

A seagull, for instance, or a crab.

Surprisingly, no one’s yet nicknamed

This galactic disemboweling

Of one NGC by another,

That is, seventy-seven fourteen

Torn by seventy-seven fifteen,

Which, in colorful Hubble pictures,

Looks remarkably like an image

Of an embryo in utero,

Like an extravagant scaling up

Of recapitulation theory

All the way to the cosmic level.

Of course, astronomers talk about

Stars being born, quite casually,

As if it were hardly metaphor,

Identifying star nurseries

As matter-of-factly as frogspawn

Identified floating in a pond.

All perfectly understandable,

The sources being more familiar

Than the targets they illuminate,

But temporally, shouldn’t it be

The other way around, things on Earth

Like birth and death, graves and nurseries

As analogous to combustions

In the night skies that preceded them?

No? Fine. The embryo galaxy.