Bold star, beyond a Sterno stove’s brief glow, We’ll live forever as we live this night: Coffee and cigarettes and comradeship, Our backs against the sun-warmed Sierras As the cold falls from infinite darkness To keep the snow in place another night, To smile in ancient silence back at you, To make a glowing, slumberous twilight until dawn. Those C-rations were good after a day Of scrambling among pre-historic rocks Made musical by the dinosaur creek, Water as cold as the dark end of time. San Diego glows in the south-southwest, Silently, inefficiently, light lost. But you, dear, happy star, will still shine down On dreaming youths, tonight and other nights, Counting for us, for them, each millennium.