How, knowing that even the universe is dying, do we bear our lives?

Most readily, through friendship, through connection, through co-creating the world we want to live in for the brief time we have together on this lonely, perfect planet.

The seventh annual Universe in Verse — a many-hearted labor of love, celebrating the wonder of reality through science and poetry — occasioned a joyous collaboration with Australian musician and writer Nick Cave and Brazilian artist and filmmaker Daniel Bruson on an animated poem reckoning with this central question of being alive.

BUT WE HAD MUSIC
by Maria Popova

Right this minute
across time zones and opinions
people are
making plans
making meals
making promises and poems

while

at the center of our galaxy
a black hole with the mass of
four billion suns
screams its open-mouth kiss
     of oblivion.

Someday it will swallow
Euclid’s postulates and the Goldberg Variations,
swallow calculus and Leaves of Grass.

I know this.

And still
when the constellation of starlings
flickers across the evening sky,
it is     enough

to stand here
for an irrevocable minute
     agape with wonder.

It is     eternity.

Couple with Daniel Bruson’s breathtaking animation of former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s poem “My God, It’s Full of Stars” from a previous season of The Universe in Verse, then revisit Nick Cave on the art of growing older and the antidote to our existential helplessness.