Last week I compared the Earth to a flower hovering in the void of space. This is an image from a poem by Gary Snyder called “For Nothing”, the first five lines of which are as follows:

“Earth a flower / A phlox on the steep / slopes of light / hanging over the vast / solid spaces…”

I enjoy how empty space becomes something solid here; something can be so vastly empty that it has a solidity about it, a hard kind of emptiness. When you think about how immense that void is it can really hit you like something solid, a hard fact about the relative smallness of the life we know. Synder’s poem continues:

“Earth a flower / by a gulf where a raven / flaps by once…”

What is this raven? I like to think it is Eternity itself, which “flaps by” in an instant because, compared to Eternity, the Earth really does only appear for an instant:

“a glimmer, a colour / forgotten as all / falls away…”

As the poem nears its end it becomes all the more poignant as the poet reminds us again that the Earth is a flower, adding that it has “no taker”: no one comes along in time to admire it, to admire us and the world we have known in our little part of space. There’s a hint of regret, inevitable regret I think, because no matter what we do there will always have been missed opportunities, gone forever once the Earth is gone.

I don’t know all that much about Gary Snyder and I don’t know if he believes in reincarnation. But even if the soul is immortal, and life is something each of us will live again and again, in the vast infinity of possibilities there will never be another Earth, never quite another chance like the one we have now.