Different lenses

[vaneramos]

I'm participating in National Poetry Writing Month, a poem a day for April. Today the website prompted us to write something about stars. I've written trillions of such verses. I call them my star poems. Canadian composer Mark Sirett even turned one of them into lyrics for a choral song. But recently I bought a macro lens, which makes me want to look at (and write about) the world of small beneath our feet. That and spring inspired today's poem.

We are a quavering audience to the stars,
their burn measured not
in seasons, lifetimes
but the breakdown of eternity.
Minute wavelengths shift,
racondite radiation dances behind darkness.
They glimmer with a permanence illusory
inspiring our brilliant denial
about the descent of time
to utter cold.

Instead let us wrap our eyes in the dirt:
dark things crawl,
solar stamens thrust from petals,
mercurial seeds spew.
On the lake, water-striders react
echoing endlessness
in the shimmer of hunger and death.
It all is change
and change shatters all
a cosmos erupting under our toes
with the fragility of now.