Star Gazing Across Generations

You may never have slept in a tent. May never have looked up to the night sky. But you can enter into the imagination of poet who imagines a boy who does.

she laughs, her red hair
ripples as it did

when she was ten and wild as her eldest
awake in his sleeping bag

looking up at his grandmother's
sky, imagining the salamanders
he'll catch tomorrow.

These are the concluding lines from Robin Becker's "Our Best Selves" which is dedicated to the memory of Miriam Goodman and is collected in Tiger Heron and which calls to mind a line from Joanne Page in Persuasion for a Mathematician: the audible slow burn of stars left you rapt, you will say

And so for day 1654
24.06.2011