The Sound of the Sun

By George Bradley b. 1953 George Bradley

It makes one all right, though you hadn’t thought of it,

A sound like the sound of the sky on fire, like Armageddon,

Whistling and crackling, the explosions of sunlight booming

As the huge mass of gas rages into the emptiness around it.

It isn’t a sound you are often aware of, though the light speeds

To us in seconds, each dawn leaping easily across a chasm

Of space that swallows the sound of that sphere, but

If you listen closely some morning, when the sun swells

Over the horizon and the world is still and still asleep,

You might hear it, a faint noise so far inside your mind

That it must come from somewhere, from light rushing to darkness,

Energy burning towards entropy, towards a peaceful solution,

Burning brilliantly, spontaneously, in the middle of nowhere,

And you, too, must make a sound that is somewhat like it,

Though that, of course, you have no way of hearing at all.

Source: Terms to be Met (Yale University Press, 1986)

Biography

Poet and anthologist George Bradley was born in Roslyn, New York in 1953. He earned a BA from Yale, and took his master’s degree at the University of Virginia. His books of poetry include Terms to Be Met (1986), which won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, Of the Knowledge of Evil (1991), The Fire Fetched Down (1996), Some Assembly Required (2001), and A Few of Her Secrets (2011). Bradley has worked as a construction foreman, a . . .

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