Love Poem 10

A shooting star

blazes across the sky,

some long lost cast-off from a hunk

of space junk.

Maybe it sprayed out of an asteroid belt somehow,

or maybe a star exploded and,

in a blink,

a planet was reduced to rubble and

all that remains are a billion billion billion

fragments floating through the void

and can only change course when

a solar flare swallows some up,

or a cloud of radiation vaporizes some more into dust and beyond,

while others still collide with other pieces of rock and ice and

space junk and explode into their own clouds of

planetary fragments

that don’t mean a thing to anyone until they do.

No one cares about a shooting star until

it comes time to make a wish

and no one cares about an asteroid until

it comes into full, cataclysmic view.

No one cares to hear the stories of those pieces of rock

that once formed a planet,

that once formed a moon;

they are but rubble until they are not.

Funny how quickly perception of junk changes

when all of a sudden

there is something to gain

or something to love,

until something that never seemed like it could happen begins

to happen.

And when the wish comes true or the impact comes to pass

we have no choice but to be witness to how profoundly something,

to which an hour ago we didn’t give a blink,

can explode our existences the same way an exploding star

exploded a planet or a moon.

Of course, we can always take heart in knowing that

not every wish or seemingly forgone conclusion will

come to pass, but we should remember

to honour and respect

that which we overlook and think past

because what we consider debris could be that which

changes everything.