Nina Powles

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Minutes

1969

The light emitted by distant galaxies
takes billions of light-years to reach us.
It comes from a far younger universe,
somewhere since expanded and receded,
somewhere where no one ever worried
about ironing their husband’s shirts
or arranging after-school childcare
because there were no ironing boards
and no children and no husbands
and no one to think of them,
only this time-travelling light,
this ghost light that reaches her
at dawn as she sits at the kitchen table
testing equations for galactic models
in the expanding and receding minutes
just before her children wake.

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