Zooming Two Lines of Shakespeare’s CXVI

“O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken”
– William Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI

How beautiful does Shakespeare paint true love:
As a calm, strong and steady being amid chaos!

But what the bard fails to address is the real cause
of that tempest and its relationship with the fixed mark.

Four hundred million years ago, a large meteorite,
as big as ten football fields, on landing on a peaceful

earth catapulted waves as big as mountains,
rains of eroding acids, violent thunderstorms,

extreme temperatures, global darkness, land separations,
and destroyed fifty percent of most life forms

and made the earth like a mad man, in complete madness,
jumping, screaming and tearing out his cloth and bod;

While the meteorite remained an ever fixed mark,
as if it did nothing but was bravely watching and surviving.

Pradeep Dhavakumar