Who are we to think that we’re any more alive than the stars,
Who spend their days burning, exploding, screaming their innermost selves to one another across the mute emptiness of day to day void,
Livers of a continuous present,
Residents of an oceanic nothingness with the bigness to hold them, now and forevermore, face to face in an unyielding embrace,
Dancers of a billion years’ dance,
Runners of an eternal race,
Giving birth with their final act of death,
Legions of celestial mothers patrolling heavenly haunts?
And we, spectral sparks cast carelessly from the surface of our tumbling ember,
Have the audacity to name them.
© Axel Cooper, 2014
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Van Gogh's The Starry Night from Wikimedia Commons |