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Born Below

The rich will eat the poor like the krill of the sea
and grateful there is no real estate among the stars
flowering in the furrowed branches of the willow,
I stand in the backyard parking lot,
and look up with the wounded longing
of a man whose questions are older than his eyes,
knowing nothing will answer the agony
of being alive awhile to bear
this incredible burden of stars
to a grave that gapes without wonder, without sky, without light.
The night is a whisper of God to the dark minerals
composed in the vastness of space
to be humbled by the exaltations of time and mind.
Mercy and healing the radiant view
that expands like a universe within
when the heart grows tired of reading the braille of its scars.
Those lights, ferocious hawks shrieking in their wheeling heights,
the shattered glass of their unsoiled scintillance
thrown down like a goblet they only drink from once,
were my first teachers, the legends of their fury,
ancient, transformative fire imbibed early
that raised me up out of myself like a face
from the boat of my hands
or a passion I couldn’t return.
Are they changed somehow for the stories we tell of their shining,
the laws by which we divine their mysterious origins,
or enhanced by the thousands of years of gazing
that first raised ziggurats and pyramids on alluvial plains
to witch the will of the gods with lightning rods
in a chaos of mutability, civilization
the delusion born thereof, do they burn blindly
above the brutal business of the world, unconcerned
with the politics of extinction that rages below,
the flaring matchbook of nuclear powers
held to a page of apocalypse
that shadows the cowering earth
with arsonists and Armageddon?
Is all that flare and fury, the creation
of the very letters by which the worlds are said,
nothing but the afterlife of a sterling moment
in which, like us, they can’t in the present be seen?
Do the stars that shone on Babylon
shine on us; shine down on nothing,
or have they been humanized even slightly,
as they have been reputed to urge our own blood into fate,
by the monocausal view of love and carnage down below?
And gods, each to themselves,
have we become as they are, indifferent to our own glory,
random debacles of accidental intent
weighing our lives in the same purposeless breath,

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