April 30: Dead Stars

[Martha]

Dead Stars
Ada Limón

Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.
                 Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us.
Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels
so mute it’s almost in another year.

I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying.

We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out
       the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban thunder.

It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue
       recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn
some new constellations.

And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,
       Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx.

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full
       of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—

to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward
       what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.

Look, we are not unspectacular things.
       We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said, No.
     No, to the rising tides.

Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land?

What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain

for the safety of others, for earth,
                 if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being terrified,

if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so big
people could point to us with the arrows they make in their minds,

rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?

--

Alas, all of this is over -- our month of poetry. Once again, thanks for being into it and I hope you enjoyed the ride. 

Any kinds of poems/poets you'd like to see more of next year?

To tide you over for the next 11 months, you can check out work by all past poets, poems with specific topics, formats, or vibes, or get treated to a randomized infusion of Vitamin Poetry..

Today in: 
2024: A Valentine for Ernest Mann, Naomi Shihab Nye
2023: Oral History of Insatiability, Jason Myers
2022: Try to Praise the Mutilated World, Adam Zagajewski
2021: In Defense of a Long Engagement, Mairead Small Staid
2020: Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness, Mary Oliver
2019: Starlings in Winter, Mary Oliver
2018: Born Yesterday, Philip Larkin
2017: Thus, He Spoke His Quietus, Thomas Lux
2016: Trees, W.S. Merwin
2015: Today and Two Thousand Years from Now, Philip Levine
2014: from For a Long Time I Have Wanted to Write a Happy Poem, Richard Jackson
2013: Tear It Down, Jack Gilbert
2012: from An Atlas of the Difficult World, Adrienne Rich
2011: Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal, Naomi Shihab Nye
2010: from Pioneers! O Pioneers!, Walt Whitman
2009: from The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot
2008: from Five-Finger Exercises, T.S. Eliot
2007: Journey of the Magi, T.S. Eliot
2006: Preludes, T.S. Eliot
2005: A Song for Simeon, T.S. Eliot

+ Link to today's poem: Dead Stars, Ada Limón

xo,
Martha