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Forgotten Star
Poetry Contest: Summer Songs
Someone drew a 5-pointed star
in black ink
above the poem I am reading
in this old book,
a poem about suicide.
It makes me think of the crushed flowers
I found sometimes
between the pages of used books
in the bookstore where I worked
when I was 25
about the time this book was put into the world
and it makes me think of the woman
I was with then
and how I wandered away from her
one terrible night.
Touching people in a timeless tryst
across the years,
wondering what the star meant,
who the crushed flowers were from
or for, that short,
heart-stopping human
life, the skies
open to be read on jealous
august afternoons.
But it was me,
I put this star above this poem
30 years ago,
a star that by the time you see it
is dead, a star without a name, without a counterpart, a star
like a shoemaker’s tear,
some lonely sun of some unknown
planet of some unknown beings
wondering why they were alive, what
they really wanted and why
death always sits there
with that look on his face
as if he knows everything,
when he really only knows one thing.
