The Beginnings Of Stars Poem by Russell Thornton

The Beginnings Of Stars

Rating: 4.0


The late sun burning close, and slow waves coming in -
the sea's mysterious lit wine of touch
on the sand, slipping away glittering
in scattered glasslike grains for an instant,
and returning again; if we belong
to each other, we belong to that touch.
Then suddenly the sun is gone; the sky
is a dark purple darkening to black.
Those sky deities appear, those bright ones
inexorably performing their fixed
and millennia-old roles said to rule a life -
glints, coruscations, crushed glare-origins
within abundant rich clusters of grapes
spreading throughout the night's summer vineyard.
There are the never-beheld-before stars,
we wish we could say rightly and at last,
when we know even the closest we see
had to have been born more than long ago,
and the farthest born and died before that.
But since the light is the way we see light,
it must be travelling in a heaven
of more than our memory will allow,
where we ourselves might see how no person
or thing or love is ever gone, but visible,
and forever new, in light, and in us,
where light is always turning, flower-like,
opening and closing and opening.
We build a fire which will repeat at night
what the sun did during the day; the sparks
fly off and disappear the way the stars
will seem to disappear tomorrow in the sun.
The body is the wine-flask and the wine;
the lover is the veil on the beloved's face.
And what we hide within, and hides from us
through all our hours of light, seems dark, and yet,
now in the dark as in the one centre
of the fusions that are stars, is pure time,
when the bodies we are wake in their day,
and we taste that day's wine, that endless beginning
of nameless fate, when we give ourselves up
to our lives, and enter another life.

COMMENTS OF THE POEM
READ THIS POEM IN OTHER LANGUAGES
Close
Error Success