April 2, 2015

The Sky Has Holes

My boyfriend once told me: "If wishes were kisses there'd be no room left in the sky for the stars."  This may not make sense to people other than me, but I love this quote so much and the thoughts that it provokes and the poem that it is.
For my Creative Writing Class this semester I get to choose fifty poems to hand-copy into an anthology, and I have two or three favorites. I noticed that most of my favorites have a line hidden in them that talks about stars."Girl" by Lisa Zaran, "Sleeping in the Forest" by Mary Oliver, "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note" by Amiri Baraka, "Do Not Stand at m Grave and Weep" by Mary Elizabeth Frye, "i carry your hear (i carry it in my heart)" by e.e.cummings, just to name a few.
There's a good chance I'll be posting some of those on this blog at some point,especially "Girl" or "Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note" because I love them so much.

Anyway, all those these mentioned poems have some line about stars. I love stars. I love the way the night sky looks. So anyway, I wrote a poem about the stars. Enjoy! 


The Sky has holes.
Someone stretched Sky over a light too bright
for our fragile human eyes.
We didn't want to see,
so we closed our faces like blinds
and built the night sky to hide the shine.

In the day we pretended not to notice,
focused on the ground,
and the leaves of trees that shivered at us
and the clouds, we watched the clouds
and turned our backs to the sun.

But at night the light blinded the crickets
and silenced the frogs,
and we did not want to see anymore.
So we built the sky.
We stretched all that blackness above our heads,
a perfect canvas that could not be painted,
and we found pride in our alone-ness.
The darkness hung there and we slept.

Now the sky has holes.
Years wore on and the seems began to rip,
little spots of string pulling away from the stitches
one by one, almost unnoticeable
until one overzealous flyer pulled the sky a little too hard
and the strings fell out
and the holes opened up
and the light shone through.

Oh the light.

It filled us with emotions that mixed like vinegar
with the baking soda of our thoughts
and we felt fear and we felt longing.
We could not sew the sky again and so we left it,
and the light pierces the fabric
all the way down to our hearts
and we are helpless to the power
we cannot understand.The light
pushes in through our bodies and drips out
of our lips or hands and falls on paper
waiting to one day reach up
and tear the sky away. 

1 comment:

  1. you nailed it, the angst. This is beautiful, my favorite so far.

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