I have had a few loads going into wind farm territories in Iowa and Kansas over the last couple of weeks. It reminds me of when they were installing turbines north of Elwood, Indiana and my drives north to Marion as they slowly grew out of the ground. Just for the big pieces it took seven trucks to bring them in. It was a cool experience watching them all go up. When they were finally done, I was driving through in the cold darkness of an early winter morning and I thought about what signals aliens might read into the red lights on top of the turbines as they would flicker on and off. Thus, “Red Stars” was born.
New stars burn cold in constellations,
flickering a generated red,
blinking out with the passing of a wing—
perhaps that of an angel or a bird,
or maybe it is just another shiny knife
cutting through space
and the moonless breeze,
again and again,
off then on,
flashing notice to more distant stars
that we are here:
dare not fly too close.
| Copyright © 2021 by Maik Strosahl Michael E. Strosahl has focused on poetry for over twenty years, during which time he served a term as President of the Poetry Society of Indiana. He also dabbles in short fiction and may be onto some ideas for a novel. He relocated to Jefferson City, Missouri, in 2018 and currently co-hosts a writers group there. In September 2020, he started the blog “Disturbing the Pond.” |
I am grateful to you, Maik, for this poem’s prompting me to look “red star” up. I learned from Wikipedia’s entry “Red dwarf” that “according to some estimates, red dwarfs make up three-quarters of the stars in the Milky Way,” none of which “can be easily observed. From Earth, not one star that fits the stricter definitions of a red dwarf is visible to the naked eye.” Also: “Because of the comparatively short age of the universe, no red dwarfs yet exist at advanced stages of evolution.” !!! – only 14,000,000,000 years old....
ReplyDeleteAll this, of course, emphasizes the creativity of your poem, imagining as you do that our sightings of red stars “blink out.”
I'm jealous--first three lines are so well written, I wish I had thought of them.
ReplyDeleteThanks for beginning my morning with this excellent poem!
I'm jealous--first three lines are brilliant!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the excellent poetry. Wish I had thought of them.