Barnard’s Star

Author:

Tamar Yoseloff

The angels dancing on the pin’s head,

the UFO glittering in the night,

the aura left after he has gone -

all of them in my mind, except

that faint red dwarf that flashes

overhead when I am boiling a kettle

or making the bed, invisible

to the naked eye, but I know it is there

tugging the sun, six light years away,

racing to make its trajectory -

the one thing I know will last.

Even now in an observatory

on some windswept hill, a man gazes

through a telescope so big it grazes

the clouds, and sights it: a ball

of hydrogen and helium: an explanation.

From Ambit No 168 (2002)

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