On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star
 would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons. 
The equivalent weight of how much railway 
it would take to get a third of the way to the sun.
 It’s the collective weight of every animal
 on earth. Times three.

Six billion tons sounds impossible
 until I consider how it is to swallow grief—
just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed
 a neutron star. How dense it is,
 how it carries inside it the memory of collapse.
 How difficult it is to move then.
How impossible to believe that anything
 could lift that weight.

There are many reasons to treat each other
 with great tenderness. One is
 the sheer miracle that we are here together
 on a planet surrounded by dying stars.
 One is that we cannot see what 
anyone else has swallowed.

-Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer