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.)

~~~