The Stars That Do Not Shine

It shouldn't be surprising, but the things I read, the classes I'm in, and the places I go constantly affect me and inspire me. That's why, walking around on a day to day basis, sometime poems just come to me and I wrestle down to paper what is was I just came up with in mind just minutes or hours before. So it is with this poem. It seemed a lot more natural and well done in my mind, but what I have isn't bad either. It just needs work and that's why I need you to read it and give me feedback. Please.


The Stars That Do Not Shine

Alcor, dark horse over labored fields,

Meissa, concealed eyes of The Hunter,

Maia, fourth brightest of The Seven Sisters,

and all the stars that do not shine

in the city, blaze bright in the country.

I discover this as I circle around

a northern hospital in Middle of Nowhere,

New Hampshire, connecting constellations

that the Greeks kept quiet and sacred,

because they were the humble gods.

This is after I spoke with a young farmer,

soon to be father, walking off his nerves.

It’s not like with cows, he said, their pain

doesn’t spill over me the way my wife’s does.

Then he returned inside to grasp her hand.

Back when I lived in the foggy Lethe lights

of the city, I could watch a man and believe

his gray tailored suit and smart shades, reflective

like a mirror, destined him. I deemed the brute beard

of a Friday fisherman meant his ill-fated scrap

lay with salmon scouring upstream.

Now that I have dived into my own lingering

black night, I discern the silence of stars

who do not shove their way into sight,

but struggle their massive souls across the fields

of time, like the shadows of giants before them.

Not all that catch the eye are luminous;

not all hidden to the crowds are small or dim

or without gravity strong enough to steady

a loved one’s world from its unstable spinning.

Here, I feel the stars shiver like a 10-ton bell.

They reverberate in the wind around this pastoral

hospital where I stand taller, healing as I hear

high-pitched cries snuggle into the deep warm glove

of a father’s arms as he names his newborn son.

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This poem was inspired by numerous things. Obviously, I'm constantly surrounded by Astronomy stuff, hence many of the star reference. Also, there's a Japanese manga about a character who moves from Tokyo to a small town and begins to feel like he can make something of himself there, while he couldn't in Tokyo, just as the stars that don't shine in Tokyo, surely do shine in the country. That was a major inspiration for this poem because I feel that there are many wonderful people who aren't known merely because they aren't in a well-known, or because they don't feel the need to compete for the spotlight. The character of the father in this poem was inspired by the last two lines of this poem, which are some of the lines that came to me in my mind, but I can't remember the lines I had had that led up to them and I thought as I was typing up the poem that I needed to show a character who did shine an who was unnoticed by many. Poetry is fiction; this never happened, but I'm still trying to reach a truth - that some of the best people aren't in the public eye.