Star explodes halfway across universe

Here’s an older poem of mine that I believe fits the new poem spark:

Shore

Against the clear light, the fresh touch of sky,
the wind from the ocean filters sand into dunes,
lights the tongues of waves that taste the people swimming.
Each second a moment is washed ashore,
ground white as sand and as clean
though the water is green,
and the dune grass is green
and the seaweed on the few gray rocks is green
as a swimsuit, wet as the far horizon in the noon hour,
bright with the blue that blankets this side of the world,
and lit with the rushing surf
on the beach of a day
precious and just as rare as a good dream.

If you get to lie there and see it, this moment,
if you get to wait until sunset and watch the sky turn midnight
when there are more stars than specks of sand on the beach,
on any beach on this world all put together,
you might see a few constellations
peer down: the belt of Orion,
the arrow of Sagittarius that points to the wishes
washed in with high tide.

It is not as surprising as you think to see the stars.
Across the earth a few of us notice and wonder
and possibly across the galaxy where light foams against time
to stretch into other systems
there could be someone who sees stars
at night, when their sun is asleep
and their tides are low
and the curtain of day has been swept aside
by the turning of a planet no human has stepped on,
where perhaps the sand is green
and alive
and made of trillions of creatures who wait for the next tide
to wash them home to shore.

She begins each poem with tears. Like the end
of a conversation where you have learned
someone has died, the words leave you empty.
Because she thinks her spirit has done the cruelest
thing, leaving her hollow and sad, she has accepted
the loneliness the way one accepts all tragedy: stoic
and bitter, both. Memory stretches inside her thoughts
but she pushes those voices away. They are the enemy
and she will not speak to them. She is hungry but instead
of food she eats medication. Refuses to look for peace.
All things are in flux around her because her vision
trembles in this grim atmosphere. The lack of permanence
frightening. She denies herself the small joys and will not
read about how the last bus stopped just in time
on the dark road, missing the fawn fixed at the side
in the light of the high beams. The lack of death
is so disconcerting that her poem bleeds words
into empty space, the lines filled eventually
with strange and unreadable symbols. Sorrow
repeated over and over until the voice of the poem
flickers quietly into silence, the comfort of loss
her only meaningful companion.

© 2007 Christine Klocek-Lim