I.
I would ask you to bring down the stars,
lay them here in my hands
so I may craft for them a love song:
carbon to carbon
from a time before memory,
a time before form.
II.
But I could never hold their sharp eternity,
my palms tiny as the toe of an ant;
they would never hear,
over their own echoing boom,
the thin scratch of my voice:
a note in their fiery storms.
III.
I’ll tell you: I will bring down the stars,
set them here at your feet
so they may sing you a love song,
carbon to carbon,
all that my heart has to say.
I tell you I will bring you the stars.
Will you wait,
while I climb?
(Ants don’t have true toes, but they do have adhesive pads that can function in a similar-to-toe-like fashion. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0141269)
(This poem doesn’t work exactly as I’d like but I like it exactly as it is, and fixing it would ruin it. I am leaving it broken and imperfect, as it came while I was walking through snow-deep woods and fields under the big sky.)
~~~