Early this morning I watched the sky for a while, and late tonight I will watch again. I doubt the crickets will see the meteors, and meteors have no crickets, but I connect them. It's one of the perks of knowing of ages I've never known and will never know and of knowing how briefly crickets sing. The death-fires in the night sky are even more brief, and fewer than the minutes of the night, though more than the years of a life. The cricket song is soothing and leaves me unconcerned. The world may rage its time, but here I find serenity where shards of the universe flame out as oblivious life sings.
Sunday Verse
Perseus
by Robert Hayden
Her sleeping head with its great gelid mass
of serpents torpidly astir
burned into the mirroring shield—
a scathing image dire
as hated truth the mind accepts at last
and festers on.
I struck. The shield flashed bare.
Yet even as I lifted up the head
and started from that place
of gazing silences and terrored stone,
I thirsted to destroy.
None could have passed me then—
no garland-bearing girl, no priest
or staring boy—and lived.
