"In Memory of Light" by Brian Buckley

In Memory of Light

I was not always cold and faint
My rays not always dim
The burning stars surround me now;
I once was one of them.
I still recall the tiny earth
The dawns I painted red
Above a land whose brilliant green
Is rocky now, and dead.

How distant are those days to me
Which yet my memory holds:
I once was bright, a blazing sun
Arrayed in crimson golds
I touched her face with flaming hand
And felt the azure sky
Her people saw me in the clouds
A white unblinking eye.

Can it be true? I pitied them?
Their microscopic lives
How quickly did they leap for death
Their husbands and their wives
How frantically they spent their days
Upon their grassy sphere
While I was strong, secure from time,
Within my fortress here.

But fleeting was their sojourn there
Beside my astral seat
In all too short a time they fled
Before my rising heat.
My fires grew immense in size
Expanding in the chill
But monstrous though I soon became
Their race flew higher still.

They sent their ships uncounted in
The blackness of the deep
They circled other suns while I
Was lying here, asleep
I wreaked my desolation on
The world I called my kin
And now a plain of ashes lay
Where forestland had been.

Away - away - how swiftly gone
The vastness of the flame
How soon, in place of stellar warmth
The frigid blackness came
I shriveled to a tiny shell
The earth was bleak and cold
Ten thousand newer homes replaced
The human race's old.

They spread throughout the galaxy
Its majesty is theirs
They need no longer fear my wrath
Or fitful solar flares
But oh, my children scattered far
Across the endless night
Do not forget your cradle here
Beside the dying light!