Falling Star Poem by Sonny Rainshine

Your friends marvel
at your dexterity,
envy your mercurial
mobility—yes,
you have wings on your heels,
a combustion engine for a heart.

You speak of your
“meteoric rise to the top, ”
but aren’t meteors burning stars?
falling suns?

No, darling, you respond
in your ever-patient drawl,
a meteor does not “fall, ”
it arcs. It bullets across
the firmament, as though
ejected by heavenly catapults,
lighting up the sky,
possessing the sky,
and titillating the masses.
Shooting stars, some call them.

*
*
*

Two days later
I receive a telegram
from her sister:
Caroline dead stop
Cardiac arrest stop
Cremation arrangments to follow stop.