34 Stars poems

Star light, star bright, First star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, Have this wish I wish tonight.

"You know Orion always comes up sideways. Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains, And rising on his hands, he looks in on me Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something I should have done by daylight, and indeed, After the ground is frozen, I should have done Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney To make fun of my way of doing things, Or else fun of Orion's having caught me. Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights These forces are obliged to pay respect to?" So Brad McLaughlin mingled reckless talk Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming, Till having failed at hugger-mugger farming, He burned his house down for the fire insurance And spent the proceeds on a telescope To satisfy a lifelong curiosity About our place among the infinities. "What do you want with one of those blame things?" I asked him well beforehand. "Don't you get one!" "Don't call it blamed; there isn't anything More blameless in the sense of being less A weapon in our human fight," he said. "I'll have one if I sell my farm to buy it." There where he moved the rocks to plow the ground And plowed between the rocks he couldn't move, Few farms changed hands; so rather than spend years Trying to sell his farm and then not selling, He burned his house down for the fire insurance And bought the telescope with what it came to. He had been heard to say by several: "The best thing that we're put here for's to see; The strongest thing that's given us to see with's A telescope. Someone in every town Seems to me owes it to the town to keep one. In Littleton it may as well be me." After such loose talk it was no surprise When he did what he did and burned his house down. Mean laughter went about the town that day To let him know we weren't the least imposed on, And he could wait—we'd see to him tomorrow. But the first thing next morning we reflected If one by one we counted people out For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long To get so we had no one left to live with. For to be social is to be forgiving. Our thief, the one who does our stealing from us, We don't cut off from coming to church suppers, But what we miss we go to him and ask for. He promptly gives it back, that is if still Uneaten, unworn out, or undisposed of. It wouldn't do to be too hard on Brad About his telescope. Beyond the age Of being given one for Christmas gift, He had to take the best way he knew how To find himself in one. Well, all we said was He took a strange thing to be roguish over. Some sympathy was wasted on the house, A good old-timer dating back along; But a house isn't sentient; the house Didn't feel anything. And if it did, Why not regard it as a sacrifice, And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire, Instead of a new-fashioned one at auction? Out of a house and so out of a farm At one stroke (of a match), Brad had to turn To earn a living on the Concord railroad, As under-ticket-agent at a station Where his job, when he wasn't selling tickets, Was setting out up track and down, not plants As on a farm, but planets, evening stars That varied in their hue from red to green. He got a good glass for six hundred dollars. His new job gave him leisure for stargazing. Often he bid me come and have a look Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside, At a star quaking in the other end. I recollect a night of broken clouds And underfoot snow melted down to ice, And melting further in the wind to mud. Bradford and I had out the telescope. We spread our two legs as it spread its three, Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it, And standing at our leisure till the day broke, Said some of the best things we ever said. That telescope was christened the Star-Splitter, Because it didn't do a thing but split A star in two or three the way you split A globule of quicksilver in your hand With one stroke of your finger in the middle. It's a star-splitter if there ever was one, And ought to do some good if splitting stars 'Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood. We've looked and looked, but after all where are we? Do we know any better where we are, And how it stands between the night tonight And a man with a smoky lantern chimney? How different from the way it ever stood?

TWINKLE, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are ! Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky. When the blazing sun is gone, When he nothing shines upon, Then you show your little light, Twinkle, twinkle, all the night. Then the trav'ller in the dark, Thanks you for your tiny spark, He could not see which way to go, If you did not twinkle so. In the dark blue sky you keep, And often thro' my curtains peep, For you never shut your eye, Till the sun is in the sky. 'Tis your bright and tiny spark, Lights the trav'ller in the dark : Tho' I know not what you are, Twinkle, twinkle, little star.

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies! O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air! The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there! Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes! The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies! Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare! Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare! Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize. Buy then! bid then! — What? — Prayer, patience, alms, vows. Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs! Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows! These are indeed the barn; withindoors house The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

Now in the West the slender moon lies low, And now Orion glimmers through the trees, Clearing the earth with even pace and slow, And now the stately-moving Pleiades, In that soft infinite darkness overhead Hang jewel-wise upon a silver thread. And all the lonelier stars that have their place, Calm lamps within the distant southern sky, And planet-dust upon the edge of space, Look down upon the fretful world, and I Look up to outer vastness unafraid And see the stars which sang when earth was made.

In Legends of the Jews, Lewis Ginzberg writes that an Egyptian princess hung a tapestry woven with diamonds and pearls above King Solomon’s bed. When the king wanted to rise, he thought he saw stars and, believing it was night, slept on. Scaling ladders with buckets of white enamel, I painted the stars and the moon on my windowpanes to hold back days and nights. I yanked the telephone and stopped the wooden clock. The weeks a lightning stroke, desire turned to love. With my blue diamond, I sliced minutes in half and made days vanish, fooling the hours. I became so skillful at firmaments that miracles occurred: a bearded comet moved across the room breeding no omens, tearing no major kingdoms into small provinces, but there it was, reminding us that rock may spin and flare, lifting the senses, burning into sight. You eased pale hands away; I saw your shoulders recede through doorways, watched your image fail with your famished smile. I left our room with dream-filled eyes, and standing in the sun, I gazed at bricks and glass and saw, suddenly, flashing in stony light, the stars and the moon.

The sky is bright with stars After a hot day The coolness of my body Leaving finger by toe in the heat of the spa Looking through the garden lights At tall houses around me I thought, No, just happy The night is bright with stars, She told me She no longer missed her parents But you loved them, I said I did, said she, more than myself And now I’m free That was my friend Pipi Such a whore, I said to myself Like me, such a whore like me As I hear the roosters of Samoa In the laughing of coyotes

For Carolina Ebeid We enrolled at barbizon Knowing full well We’d never look like What was promised Cue carol of the bells Cue a demo on the casio And the security of two-way Escalators setting the speed Those early mornings In our mall school The store’s silver grills Some mannequins left Half-clothed We’d taunt them With our imagined summers In london paris rome We weren’t please and thank you Walking with books on our heads No we were going to devastate Greek shipping heirs At every port of call Yet when our bus broke down And we trudged the shoulder Of highways Single file Dodging cigarette butt and horn We shook off those mornings Studied Their defenseless Indifference The blinding surface The quality of electric Without being alive We knew that there In only hot pants The ideal form Plastic Most would take a bullet for While at 16 We were already trash-talking Our prayers never went beyond The second floor Light-years away From the last word That distant somewhere Where a boat loses course The north star forsaking Its name to another

For Russians the stars are always incontinent, ejaculatory smears across the squalor of a boundlessly unhygienic sky. You’d scoff, Marina, at how I go at them with a tiny plastic shovel and my litter box technique, scooping up the sidereal splooge while trying to wipe down the universe. You’d say I tug at God’s Old Testament beard, praying the prayers of a coward. You’d confide to your diary my eyelashes don’t bat sootily enough.Such a lummox could never rumple the sheets of Paris

A poem I keep forgetting to write Is about the stars, How I see them in their order Even without the chair and bear and the sisters, In their astronomic presence of great space, And how beyond and behind my eyes they are moving, Exploding to spirals under extremest pressure. Having not mathematics, my head Bursts with anguish of not understanding. The poem I forget to write is bursting fragments Of a tortured victim, far from me In his galaxy of minds bent upon him, In the oblivion of his headline status Crumpled and exploding as incomparable As a star, yet present in its light. I forget to write.