NAVIGATING THE STAR ROADS

I imagine tomorrow’s house as a place 

of four walls invoking the four directions, 

instead of the sagging skirt of this tent. 

A roof, where stargazing is mandatory, 

where we once again travel the Milky Way, 

Orion’s sword cleaving the winter sky, 

though my eyes are always in need of reading glasses, 

to navigate the labyrinth of words that deluge us daily.

For a moment, it comes into focus, and I rejoice.

I may not be able to align a triple junction of tail-lights 

while driving down the road, astigmatism’s gift,

but for a moment, a constellation springs into focus, 

the Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, the Gazelle Leaps. 

Once I could see more stars with the naked eye, 

like the time we hiked up Mount Whitney, 

and the Milky Way was truly a sea made of stars. 

Or as we gazed up from the loft of the Andes, 

the sky was occluded with wildfire smoke, 

so I wasn't aware the constellations had shifted. 

A consolation was a glimpse of the Southern Cross.

The Big Dipper hovered on the horizon 

like an afterthought pointing to the direction of home.  

But I’m thrilled that I can find any constellation 

at all in a vast wilderness of sky lonely as ice. 

When the Big Dipper emerges overhead from the blur, 

it steals my breath away, and once again, 

I can find true north within the void, 

not easy to do in a sky filled with industrial light, 

not like the dark nights of childhood, where stars 

shone with a brilliance rarely witnessed. 

All the cells that I have ever been in the past, 

are annealing the starlight like folded iron 

at the smithies forge into a sword of light 

as I fathom these four walls called home, 

then I realize that the idea of home is held 

deep within the memory of self.

12/6/23 Write On! with Nancy Woo