poem – Page 58 – don't confuse the narrator

shooting stars II

Yesterday‘s narrator had all she wished for, which might be why the poem was so short. Today’s narrator doesn’t, though she seems to have realised that wishing on a star won’t help:

Perseids

The night I met you fire flared in the skies
and seams of gold were visible across
the coalmine dark. Nature had purged the dross
of normal life, it seemed. We raised our eyes
to watch with joy as stars fell round about:
each one a dream of summer love, a wish,
each an unspoken promise, each a kiss
that fanned desire and silenced truth and doubt.
And so we boldly told each other lies,
pretending to believe they could come true;
we watched those stars like lovers, though we knew
that we could not escape existing ties.
At heart, we knew the stars are fixed, not free,
set in their courses, much like you and me.

star’ku

Watching shooting stars,
your arm around my shoulders

No need for wishes

For those who are looking for more perseids, I posted a few other pieces on the subject of shooting stars this time last year.

non-existent blue

giant fennel plants silhouetted against blue sky and clouds

Adaptation

I could show you a planet where creatures
walk upright on two legs. Seeing
a non-existent blue, they name it sky, and stretch
towards stale light in ignorance. Oblivious
to gravity which anchors them, they carve
each step through swirling gas as if a vacuum
and breathe in toxins unaware. Insular
as paramecia, they can’t converse
with any of the other untold tenant species
of their world. They know no other life.

(I don’t know when I wrote this, but it turned up recently among a set of pieces I’ve been trying to organise. It doesn’t seem to belong there, so perhaps it belongs here.)

notes for a poem

I went for a walk beside a canal the other day and hope eventually to write a poem about the swans I saw there.

Poems can take a long time to actually gel, though, so in the meantime, I’ll leave some preliminary notes here.
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misreading

I become more and more dependent on my glasses, but even when I am wearing them, letters dance on the page – and they do so even more when the text is on the screen.

The following sprang from a misreading of a perfectly normal expression:

Phrases of the moon

A single quotation mark
opens the discourse, which swells
to a full-mouthed ‘O’, then fades;
a silver comma follows, and then
silence.