THE TRUTH IS WHAT I MAKE IT

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.