Most of us picture the universe as a place full of light, with a few dark gaps between the stars. Q.R. Quasar turns that picture over. In this poem darkness is the normal condition, and light is the rare interruption, the moment when a restless sleeper half-wakes. The Universe is a single figure lying in a "long long night," tossing and turning, and everything we call brightness is what happens when it opens its eyes.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre, and it doesn't need them. Its music comes from repetition. "In the long long night" returns again and again like a refrain, and so does "the Universe tosses and turns." Whole stanzas are nearly repeated: "from time to time / the Universe wakes up" appears several times, each with slightly different wording. Reading it, you feel the monotony of a sleepless night, the same thoughts circling back. The line breaks help. "In the interminably long / long night" stretches across a break so that the second "long" arrives late, and "with long stretches between" is itself a drawn-out line. The poem makes you wait, as the Universe does.
The central image is domestic. A "vacuum bed" joins the bedroom to the physics of empty space, and the word "vacuum" works twice, as the void of space and as the feeling of nothing around a person who can't sleep. Giving the Universe a capitalised "Its," as if it were a person or a god, turns something unimaginably huge into something we know from experience: insomnia, restlessness, and dreams that can't be remembered. The dreams are "unconscious" and "restless," and the poem never says what they contain. That silence makes them more unsettling.
The waking moments are written differently. The language turns visual and active: "opens Its eyes / light streams in / and light streams out." The eyes both receive and give, as if seeing and shining were the same act. Later the verbs sharpen into "light jets out them" and "the Universe wakes and blazes." A reader with some astronomy may hear an echo of the jets of energy that bright cosmic objects throw out, and the poet's name, Quasar, is itself the name of such an object. Whatever its origin, the name suits a poem about light flaring in vast darkness. Still, the poem never leans on technical vocabulary. Its pictures of waking are simple and physical, and they are all the more vivid for it.
The proportions of the poem matter as well. The waking is brief, and the poem gives it little room. It is wrapped in long stretches of "never-ending night," and the return to sleep is blunt. After the blaze comes "then falls back again into the darkness," and then a line to itself: "falls back into darkness." The short line drops like a head onto a pillow. The ending circles back to the opening, but with one change. The Universe no longer only "tosses and turns." It "sleeps fitfully," and the closing sentence, "the Universe wakes and the Universe sleeps," is as plain and even as breathing. Waking and sleeping become a cycle with no climax and no resolution.
One small detail is worth noticing. Almost everywhere the pronoun is capitalised, "Its," but near the end it slips to lowercase in "its restless unconscious dreams." It may be an accident, but it could also suggest the figure shrinking as it sinks back into sleep. That is only a reading, but the poem rewards that kind of attention.
What makes the poem worth reading is the way it handles scale. Astronomical time and distance are too large to feel, so the poem gives them a human rhythm and lets repetition do the work that numbers can't. It also quietly changes how we see ourselves. If light is only the Universe's brief waking, then everything bright, including whatever we are, belongs to that moment, and the poem suggests the dark will come back. It is a bleak thought, but the tone is gentle, almost like a lullaby, and the poem seems to watch the sleeper with tenderness rather than fear.