Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
—John Keats
We crunch through the snow in the predawn
blue-black cold and he tells me about the stars:
Vega, Betelgeuse, Arcturus, Rigel. And the bright one,
Venus, not even a star. I’m sixteen, he’s seventeen.
I’m glad to have an older person to talk to, someone to listen.
Grasping neither time nor space,
we set a date to meet again, forty years in the future,
when in our fifties, we seldom speak,
the stars still burning, still dying,
moving farther and farther apart.
we set a date to meet again, forty years in the future,
when in our fifties, we seldom speak,
the stars still burning, still dying,
moving farther and farther apart.
Read on . . .