Ancient Light

I can’t sleep. It’s the stars.

Not those nebulous, negligible pin-holes of light dying in the city, but desert stars: fat diamonds, the silver-dark genius of the gods.

I can’t sleep.

Hydrogen-debris in a cosmos of light. Vapour, white flame, split and glowing. Nuclei fused. Now, let there be woman, to be showered in stardust and detonated earthward to that deadly Garden.

We all of us are the children of those starlit parents, those heated shards of heaven’s core, the matter of those ruined ones — translucent, bloodless souls — who never knew to hold us, even as we died.