Starlight Unanswered
Through the Author’s Lens:
This poor verse is born not of mastery, but of misgiving: a small, inward turning against those assurances handed down as knowledge, yet purchased at the cost of wonder. It sets forth no quarrel with faith itself, but rather with the frail wish in us to be eased of unknowing, and with the quiet consent by which we take comfort where truth withholds it. Written from within that fault, not above it, the poem seeks no revelation, nor dares it promise rest; it abides instead with what remains when answers fail, trusting that there is a stern kindness in a world which will not speak itself plain.
—A Reckoning Without Oracles—
They measured me in numbers that stood still,
As though the sky were ledger—never wound;
Pinned light to names, fixed motion into will,
Then called the breathing vastness “understood.”
The hour was dated; birthplace sealed a door;
The future learned its posture on their page—
As if the dark had never come before,
As if the stars consented to a cage.
Yet time I felt—not counted—shifted skin,
A thing that alters even as it goes;
Not what the clocks declare, but what within
Unfastens cause from consequence I know.
Two lives begin beneath the selfsame cry,
One breath, one cut of air, one natal sound—
They part like thoughts no chart can certify,
Their endings seldom where they both are found.
When asked how this occurs, the answer thins—
A curtain drawn where certainty might stand;
They speak of debts the body never wins,
Of former lives no memory can hand.
The soul is endless—so they say—yet bound
By terms no living witness can recall;
Thus ignorance is sanctified as ground,
And mystery made useful—that is all.
I watched myself believe, because belief
Was lighter than the weight of not-yet-knowing;
I drank from wells that offered only grief,
Mistaking depth for water in its going.
Hope, when starved, accepts a counterfeit,
And names it bread because the mouth must eat;
I wanted fate to speak, to counterfeit
The terror of a road without a seat.
No stars absolve me. Nor does reason save.
The error was not theirs alone, but mine—
To wish the universe would somehow behave,
Would bend, would mean, would soften its design.
Sense comes too late, and not as remedy:
The world is kind, but never in our way.
Faith is not where the answers come for free.
I stood. The dark did not explain itself.
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