Wandering Stars

The song he played was not a song and not even a lament and not an alarm but like a call from a broken bird, whose throat and beak had become elongated through some trial of pain meant to break him, but only ended up transforming him into something longer stretched, and into his song with these notes that kept stretching after he stopped playing them, that and about everything we’d been feeling all along stuck in our suits and dresses, in that school and without our language, he was making music find it for him, his lost tongue and all of ours.

I’d always had dreams about all of the stars in the sky falling down to earth, collapsing on us. I hated those dreams but they taught me something. As the stars were coming down, about to land right on top of me, each time I dreamed it, I said a little prayer, to say thank you that I got to be here, if I had to go, it was the last thing I wanted to be able to say before I went. Thank you. Beneath a willow tree whose branches almost touched the water, my mother said, “The spiders weave a web to keep the stars in place, as guiding light in our darknesses. The stars are our ancestors, but the spiders are too. They are the weaving and the light.”

The song he played was not a song and not even a lament and not an alarm but like a call from a broken bird, whose throat and beak had become elongated through some trial of pain meant to break him, but only ended up transforming him into something longer stretched, and into his song with these notes that kept stretching after he stopped playing them, that and about everything we’d been feeling all along stuck in our suits and dresses, in that school and without our language, he was making music find it for him, his lost tongue and all of ours.

I’d always had dreams about all of the stars in the sky falling down to earth, collapsing on us. I hated those dreams but they taught me something. As the stars were coming down, about to land right on top of me, each time I dreamed it, I said a little prayer, to say thank you that I got to be here, if I had to go, it was the last thing I wanted to be able to say before I went. Thank you. Beneath a willow tree whose branches almost touched the water, my mother said, “The spiders weave a web to keep the stars in place, as guiding light in our darknesses. The stars are our ancestors, but the spiders are too. They are the weaving and the light.”