NAMING THE STARS

I don't "dig" much poetry written in English after 1870, but I like this one, written in July 2000, and curiously appropriate to what was going on in my life at that time.

NAMING THE STARS

This present tragedy will eventually
turn into myth, and in the mist
of that later telling the bell tolling
now will be a symbol, or, at least,
a sign of something long since lost.

This will be another one of those
loose changes, the rearrangement of
hearts, just parts of old lives
patched together, gathered into
a dim constellation, small consolation.

Look, we will say, you can almost see
the outline there: her fingertips
touching his, the faint fusion
of two bodies breaking into light.


Joyce Sutphen