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Regular news and insight from our many poets, writers, educators and facilitators

14 January 2026

Posted by Joanna Barnard

What If?

Another What If? poem, this time by Writing for Wellbeing participant Jack Billington. We were inspired last term by the wonderful Ada Limon's poem Dead Stars.

Looking forward to our new term of writing, beginning tomorrow. Thanks Jack for letting us share your beautiful words.


 

What If


What if we were meant to be human beings,

and not the frantic doings we’ve become.

 

Pacing in circles, dazzled by our own inventions,

hungry for a stimulation that never satisfies,

offering up our days to the warm hum of consumption.

 

What if this is how a species sleepwalks,

not with terror, but with content,

drifting softly toward the edge?

 

What if we’ve forgotten the darkness we were born from,

the endless night that held us,

long before we tamed the sky.

 

What if we stand beneath ancient heavens

and mistake the light of dying stars for a promise.

Their beauty a cruel mirage,

their brilliance already gone by the time it reaches us.

A sky full of ghosts whispering;

Don’t worry, you have more time.

 

What if our greatest wound

is the shrinking of our imagination.

That soft, celestial engine

once capable of dreaming cities from sand

and constellations from chaos?

 

Now we bend it to smaller things:

to calendars, to fleeting agendas,

to those who ask us only

to imagine a future that fits neatly

within their own brief term in power.

 

And what if beneath the noise,

beneath the screens and the deadlines

and the desperate need to feel useful,

we still carry the capacity

to envision something greater?

 

A future that outlives the minds that dreamed it,

that grows roots deeper than any mandate,

that glows with a light not borrowed from dying stars,

but forged anew, fiercely,

by a humanity that remembers

what it once hoped to become?

 

What if all is not lost

only forgotten?

 


-Jack Billington

Photo by Dave Pullis on Unsplash

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