Say the universe didn’t begin with a bang
but with a whisper. Say the stars were
crystallized by their fear of being forgotten.
Say there was life outside of our solar system;
somewhere in a pocket of secrets is a planet
no wider than we know the sea to be deep &
there lives a child that only knows how to
bury seeds but not how to water them.
It believes in nature not nurture, & believes
in the moon. Every night the sunset fades
into silk & silence as it appears, pockmarked
& partitioned into ruby red craters like a
pomegranate. The child stretches onto
dewy grass & reaches upwards. In his dreams
he can cradle the moon in his palms & pick
a jewel out of each crater. They melt on his
tongue & he swallows the heart at each center.
He laments the bitter aril that surrounds each
one & wishes that they would not choke him
every time. The stars don’t know how to tell him
that the bitterness is born from the seeds that
he buries, & that he is only tasting the fruits of
his labor. A seed can only grow when it’s watered
& a jewel can only bloom into sweet syrup when
it’s rooted in remembrance. But he never learns.
In his dreams, the child plucks the craters clean
& loses himself in a solar system without stars.
