Sphere

A billion spheres
circling in stately ballet round their suns:
ice-blue outriders, star-burnt cinders, pock-marked survivors,
monstrous gobblers of other worlds.
Each one magnificent in its own way
but dead – its dance predestined, its shifts and cycles
forced on it by movement through the void.

How did it come to be that here
a rock no different from a million others
was haloed by a veneer of blue and green?
Skin deep, if that, leaving no trace beneath its outer surface;
so fine, so fragile that a chance encounter
or the slightest shifting of the dance would make it disappear.
A thing so insubstantial it seems almost nothing
– yet is almost everything. 

First published in WayWords