Some nights I look up at the stars and see art.
I am struck by wonder and awe.
Their glow fills my heart and every crevice of my soul.
I search until I find the shape of two shining eyes and a smile in the disconnected dots.
I talk to that approachable yet unknowable face,
And strain to hear any whispered words it might return.
I see lighthouses in the sky.
I see a reason to stay alive.

Other nights, I look up and see simply spheres of gas.
Hydrogen and helium.
Lanterns destined to burn out and die,
Along with all the lights and lives below them.
Blindly surviving in a vast space that is too dark And too empty.
Mindless chemicals endlessly reacting while we Twist them into purpose and prophecies,
Empty promises.

But every night I look at the stars, I can’t deny their beauty.

For one brief golden moment rare like wine,
The gracious city swept across the line;
Oblivious of the color of my skin,
Forgetting that I was an alien guest,
She bent to me, my hostile heart to win,
Caught me in passion to her pillowy breast;
The great, proud city, seized with a strange love,
Bowed down for one flame hour my pride to prove.

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

we love flowers when they’re already dying.
we water them,
trying to save them.
trying to keep them for as long as we can.

you watched my petals fall to the ground.
but that’s okay.
because that’s when we love flowers the most.