Ghost Fungus Magellanic Cloud

Here’s your astronomy picture for today,
Courtesy of someone in Australia—
Two exposures stitched together smartly,
One of the ground-level, dull-green glow
Of a bioluminescent fungus,

The other framing a clear desert sky
On a moonless night over Wannon Falls,
Focusing on the fuzzy satellite
Galaxy called Large Magellanic Cloud,
Near a hundred-sixty-thousand light years

To port beside the River of Heaven.
Other than as sources of those wavelengths
Visible to the naked human eye
(Ashamed to discover itself naked
As always, ashamed of limitations

It imagines evident in the eyes
Of any observant divinity)
Shifting perspective from a patch of dirt,
What on Earth could these blurs have in common?
They ignite our fondness for things that glow,

Our sense that seen spectra host the spectral,
That the magical resides in the light,
That whatever our gelatinous eyes
Can perceive, our brains interpret as bright,
Our populations interpret as names

And tales of supernatural agency,
Can be coaxed together and wicked tightly
In a spell, in a frame, in poetry,
Then made to dance with the flame of meaning
Shimmering in lamps devised from seeming.