Poetry | A Thousand Stars

A woman sleeps beneath a thousand stars,

Enough up there for every mood of her heart,

A wind skirts the corners of her room,

And she dreams of waking up and creeping out,

With fairies, prophets, gods and talking dogs,

In her slip, legs bare beneath the moon

To jump from stone to stone or wade through water,

Cat-curled, her palms closed between her thighs,

She dreams. Outside, heaves change,

All the leaves and moonlight and the rain,

Every haunted moor alive, every unknown

Sea humming in the air!

A rap against her window

Wakes her,

drags her from her vision’s eerie heights,

And by the grace of one branch beating on her pane,

She leaves her bed, bare legged as if she’d heard her name,

To go outside and see the thousand stars

Suddenly alive in the whispering, sacred night.