17/03/2026
We were treated to an amazing journey around the universe recently at Harpley Church when Rev Tobias Thornes and Richard Lewis opened our eyes to the beauty and the enormity of the galaxies and nebulae captured using Richard’s telescope in the dark night sky of Suckley.
To set our minds and imagination in the right direction - local Clifton-on-Teme poet Terri Thacker read us this poem she wrote for the occasion:
Night Walk in Starlight
The Sky slips on her velvet cloak of deepest indigo,
and over it she throws a veil of moon-spun tulle,
sparkling with diamonds in their thousands …..
hot blue, cool red, white,
embroidered into convoluted patterns - one vast tapestry of night.
I wonder at this beauty, and with awe, reflect that every jewel’s a mighty sun, Supernovae, Neutrons, Giants, Dwarves, massive, spinning orbs of white-hot gas.
What I can see from Earth as ‘diamond light’
Has travelled eons of time and space to reach my sight.
Asterisms, Constellations, Nebulae, form patterns in a universal void more vast than human mind can comprehend.
My little eyes, with limited, weak sight, see just a splintered fragment of a whole, and only through the magic lens of night.
How small and insignificant am I, and yet, as complex and unique as stars … their essence has created what I am.
Is that the roar of solar winds I hear?
But no …. a sudden veil of cloud obscures all light,
returns me to the owl/screech, fox-bark, hush
of this world’s night.
