Bright Star
The stars
so bright.
I had to search online
and find
what it was I saw out there.
Orion I knew
thanks to you.
Mars
not hard.
But the others?
So many.
One so bright
I thought it must be
a plane.
Plain to see –
it was Sirius.
No, seriously.
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune.
That’s a lot of planets (they look like stars; only astronomers know the difference)
to see
all at once.
And the constellations. O! the constellations.
Unchanged since Aristotle, and Galileo, and Shakespeare.
Unchanged since the Celts and the Vikings.
We humans have changed, but not you,
you Stars, you!
You are the stuff of which philosophy is made.
Do we shine
like this
to you?
to the other stars?
Do they—the people, the aliens, the others—
look up
and see us?
Do they go out
in their slippers
and stand
in the cold
and marvel?
Monasterevin
November 24th, very early
amazing to think that the stars we see may have been extinguished millions of years ago and all we see is the light they sent out before they died