Constellations

Richard Fireman believes a good poem should reflect both individual and universal perspectives, and strives to do so in his work, expressing his thoughts and feelings about both the microcosm of his life's experiences and the macrocosm of the universe at large. Each of his poems are constellations in the sky of his life, presented to the reader for interpretation and meaning. Here is the world as I see it, he says; this is how it seems to me. We are all in the same world, looking up at the stars, and this is my viewpoint, one man in the vast unknowable universe.

 

Constellations are our attempt to make sense of the universe.

We create patterns in the sky, trying to understand what God might mean,

and write our stories as if we knew.

These poems are my constellations. The words are stars.

May their light be a guide to find your way home.

 

Scape

Ancestors called them constellations,

populated the heavens with stories,

made the giant wheel turn

to human rhythms, pushed

the wheel turning night

to day turning life

to tales of gods and men and women turning

into gods, conquering monsters as we conquer

the turning of time, guiding

the wheel with imagination's surging push,

through any black hole yet unthought-of,

past any edge at the end of any world.

 



New Worlds Need Names

                   

This time it was all going well      

but as we watched the TV 

she said it's going too well,

something's going to happen.

At the end of the show I got ready to leave

and she asked me to take her home.

 

She was home. She didn't know

like she didn't know I came to see her each week

or what a galaxy was

or how to tear a tissue.

She couldn't understand how I knew she'd be there,

how I'd know what planet to point the ship at.

 

As I write this I hear on the news

we sent up a rocket to catch a piece of a comet.

On the way home on the radio is a story

of snow falling on the living and dead.

Outside the car freezing rain is falling.

 

Last week my mother said Pop is coming

but didn't know whose or the difference.

In the old days they were wise to make constellations

when they didn't know where they were heading,

to recognize what was too far away.