There’ll be some more time for you
to apprise us of how you could look
the world in the eye—well away from
everybody’s eyes—before the last sliver
of your light dies out in empty obscurity.
You couldn’t be the crazy gem
they keep on saying you were,
because no one has ever cut you
into any standard shaping—
you had no facets, just one face.
Still—more than any brilliant—
you decomposed the hungry fire
that has always haunted you
into a billion shooting rays,
brighter than the wildest sun.
Like a meteor subject to no rule
you’ve kept wandering the skies,
shunning stars and other bolides,
little solitary sphere adrift unseen
long deprived of your own glow.
Now the skies move down and stop
to watch your trail dissolving slowly,
yet nobody really knows what’s going on,
what that sparkle fading in the distance is.
Away from us—inside us the sun goes dark.
