Only the Stars
I don't look at stars anymore.
As a boy I would sneak out into the night
to hear the horses and barn mice
chewing over their hurts and simple hopes.
I could smell the waking dreams
of dogs and cats.
a nocturnal alchemy I considered
to be an extension of my integral soul.
I did not look upwards
I looked inwards and saw where I was
in that sensory cauldron, the broth of being.
One clear and cold night,
I looked up and knew that I was far away,
far away from this farmed backwater,
far from these backwoods,
the barn, the flagstone kitchen, my mother,
my father, myself.
The stars, those blazing guardians
of eternal silence, held me
enthralled to a distance I could not imagine.
I was only this tenuous stem of blood,
left here to sway on the edge of an horizonless night,
a vastness that held my breath and heartbeat
in the limbo of its indifferent favor.
That night, the stars spoke to me
in the language of the dead.
For a moment, the far away echoed close,
while I, like a moth, felt pinned to the void.
I heard the starlight sing and if that song had words
it would have said:
We harvest your dreams,
set fire to them, use there ash
and your ashes to come, for fuel.
Only we exist among the doomed.
Only the stars.
Copyright © Eric Ashford | Year Posted 2021
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