Writing in the Dark with Jeannine Ouellette

Writing in the Dark with Jeannine Ouellette

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Writing in the Dark with Jeannine Ouellette
Writing in the Dark with Jeannine Ouellette
Twinkling Is Just An Effect

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

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Jeannine Ouellette
Dec 06, 2024
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Writing in the Dark with Jeannine Ouellette
Writing in the Dark with Jeannine Ouellette
Twinkling Is Just An Effect
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Photo from the Invisible Strings launch reading!

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 …

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