you titan of time,
you river whose banks are bone,
I have drifted your length
until memory itself has frayed.
I have loved within you.
I have watched their faces fade.
Their names now crumble
in the mouths of new stars.
They were bright once
my beloveds,
my friends,
my wars,
my worlds.
They built towers
that pierced the firmament,
spoke in symphonies of science,
danced on the edge of becoming gods.
And then
ashes.
Always ashes.
Civilizations bloom like fireflowers,
brilliant and brief.
They rise.
They fracture.
They forget.
A thousand times I’ve seen
the same pride,
the same fall,
the same desperate reaching
toward some meaning
before the dusk.
And now…
the galaxy grows quiet.
Fewer voices hum across the stars.
Fewer signals break the dark.
Even chaos
has learned to sleep.
I should rejoice.
Or weep.
But I am past such tides.
Instead, I witness.
I am the watcher who cannot close his eyes.
O galaxy,
cradle of the frantic,
the cruel, the wondrous
rest now.
You have earned it.
And if no one sings your lullaby,
then let it be me.
(Folded into the final stanza’s cadence - “rest now / you have earned it / let it be me” - is a long-cycle decay cipher, mimicking the redshift of a retreating universe. Its slow pulse reveals a cartographic time-map of galactic silence zones, encoded through poetic gravity wave modulation. Lyrax has been watching everything - and this is his eulogy to what once stirred the stars.)