THE TRUTH IS WHAT I MAKE IT
Originally published in Wasteland Review, my poem inspired by a line of satellites crossing the night sky during quarantine.
The Starlink array arcing over my slice of night
is also a freight train of light, is also a string of pearls,
is also the end of the sky as I know it –
uncluttered and unchanged since man first
left his cave, looked up and found himself
in a cluster of stars that looked like a hunter.
Just like him, just like everyone he knew.
That, I’ll get over. It’s not like I can name
anything up there without an app to guide me.
I’m not proud to confess I only look up
for something new: a meteor shower,
the blinking drift of an airplane,
a cloud shaped like a woman birthing the moon.
Here then gone, special only because I saw it,
named it and watched it go.
//
It’s a sign, right? I’m two days out from the city
in 2020 and terrified I brought a cough with me.
I believe the sky is telling me I didn’t, but also
death is just a door, and also I am more than
a cursor moving through the dark. These satellites
are a lightspeed promise to keyboard hunters
like me, like everyone I know – something will
remain, even if its tidy line abstracts and no eye
remains to map it out. The next time they come
around, I won’t even know. I don’t have that app.
In two weeks, a storm will come. The lights will
flicker and in those dark seconds I’ll believe
the world is ending. And in another two weeks,
I’ll watch a lamb be born on a neighbor’s farm
and believe it’s just beginning.
___________________________________
Author's Note: To read the poem in its original home, please click here. While you're there, please poke around the Wasteland Review. They publish gorgeous work.
About the Creator
A Failed Artist, A Disillusioned Poet, An Underpaid Game Show Host
I took my son and niece to Gori, a small town in Georgia where Joseph Stalin was born. They talked me into visiting the Stalin's Museum, the largest in the post-Soviet space. I had resisted going there because I just can't stand the monster and know enough about him, or so I thought.
By Lana V Lynx6 days ago in FYI
Comments (2)
It is indeed whatever we believe it to be, even if only in our mind. Let someone else make of it what they will.
🌹wonderfully, Suze