“Stars, Like Policemen, Often Come In Pairs” Giles Sparrow, A History of the Universe in 21 Stars (and 3 imposters)

After chapter six I get distracted, put the book down, and leave it
on a shelf with likeminded volumes of good intentions
I mean to come back to. 

Ursa Major makes a den for itself among scattered thoughts
hibernates until night unfolds, then The Great Bear yawns
stirs like memory and steps into the sky. 

It takes the right kind of observation, to find binary stars. 
They huddle so close that they obscure their own pairings,
burn as a single pinpoint to the naked eye. 

Two magnitudes in perpetual orbit, moving as one, 
two halves of a whole, it is easy to paint a romance on devotion 
so far removed. 
 
Our sun is solitary, though not extraordinarily so, or oddly so. 
Stars (I read) are loners just as often as couples
And it makes no difference to their brightness. 

There is nothing wrong with a little loneliness. 
Sometimes the only light you need is the one you hold
sometimes space is what makes you seen. 

Bluebell Wood

In the woods there are houses

and bricks like broken teeth,

pockmarks in the bramble thorns and climbing ivy,

vines like fingers, tucked in deep on walls

battered and spat into tumble-down ruins

sinking further into the banks

where the river coils and drifts

between the reeds and weeds

and the washed up refuse

of someone’s empty pockets,

as the sky passes over

those flickers from the undergrowth

until it all, eventually, grows still.

 

dverselogo

I was really stuck for what to write for this prompt and in the end this was about all that I could manage. I’m not sure if it fits exactly with the style of ‘ecopoetry’ but I’m hoping I managed to get the mix of human and nature into this piece.