Twinkling Is Just An Effect
How I found myself writing a poem for a Taylor Swift anthology in response to a song I'd never heard by a star I barely knew
We say, this will be over in a heartbeat, but we don’t feel that heartbeat-sized truth until something vanishes, and its absence roots itself into the cavities of our bones, where the marrow makes and remakes our blood. We say, our bones are made of stars, but this is mostly an abstraction until we face our own death, or possibly the death of a true beloved—or, if we are very lucky, the birth of a child. We say things are blinding, but we don’t remember what it means to be blind until we can no longer see whatever blinded us. We say stars twinkle, but they only appear to twinkle in the night sky when viewed from the surface of Earth—twinkling is an effect from the atmosphere. We call our children our children, but Kahlil Gibran warned otherwise more than one hundred years ago in his poem “On Children,” in which he said (in part):
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come …