Consequentia

 

Consequentia

(A lone voice whispers)

Like the Sagittarius *. A Black Hole, at the centre of our own known galaxy.

Does getting older make you slowly swallow more and more former memories? 

To wallow in bygone years spent with family, friends, lovers, and enemies?

Like this, Senryu below, which looks at the weaknesses of human nature.

Found in all human semidocumentaries?

Breathlessness Desire 

Adolescent Memories

Old age consumes all

(575)

(C) 

Copyright John Duffy

A poem exploring a quiet, philosophical meditation on time, ageing, and the inescapable gravity of memory—told in a hushed, reflective voice.

The black hole metaphor opening with Sagittarius A*—the black hole at the centre of our galaxy—sets the emotional physics of the poem. 

A black hole doesn’t just sit there; it pulls everything inward.

 Suggesting that ageing works the same way: as we grow older, memories aren’t released or left behind—they’re drawn back in, accumulating with immense weight.

So the question:

Does getting older make you slowly swallow more and more former memories?

Isn’t rhetorical—it’s existential. 

Ageing becomes less about moving forward and more about being pulled backward, repeatedly revisiting what once was.

Memory as gravity.

The poem moves through categories of human connection—family, friends, lovers, enemies—covering the full emotional spectrum. 

This matters as it suggests that nothing is exempt from this pull: love, pain, joy, regret all collapse into the same inner mass over time.

“Wallow” is used as a loaded word here. It hints at both comfort and stagnation—memory as something warm, but also something that can trap us.

Human weakness & documentation.

By referencing “semidocumentaries”, the poem subtly critiques how humans narrate their own lives. 

We edit, frame, revisit—never purely objective, never fully fictional. Memory becomes a flawed archive, shaped by desire, loss, and hindsight.

The senryu (575) as a life cycle.

The senryu distils the whole poem into a single arc:

Breathlessness / Desire – youth, urgency, longing.

Adolescent Memories – identity forming, experiences imprinting.

Old age consumes all – the black hole completes its work.

“Consumes” is key. Old age doesn’t just remember—it absorbs, compresses, and transforms everything that came before.

At its core, Consequentia is about the consequence of being human:

to live is to accumulate, and to age is to carry the full gravitational weight of that accumulation.

It’s not nihilistic—but it is sober. The whispering voice suggests acceptance rather than panic: a recognition that memory, like gravity, cannot be escaped—only understood.