A Tender Brace of Stars

Variations On The Word Love
Margaret Atwood

This is a word we use to plug
holes with. It's the right size for those warm
blanks in speech, for those red heart-
shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing
like real hearts. Add lace
and you can sell
it. We insert it also in the one empty
space on the printed form
that comes with no instructions. There are whole
magazines with not much in them
but the word love, you can
rub it all over your body and you
can cook with it too. How do we know
it isn't what goes on at the cool
debaucheries of slugs under damp
pieces of cardboard? As for the weed-
seedlings nosing their tough snouts up
among the lettuces, they shout it.
Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising
their glittering knives in salute.

Then there's the two
of us. This word
is far too short for us, it has only
four letters, too sparse
to fill those deep bare
vacuums between the stars
that press on us with their deafness.
It's not love we don't wish
to fall into, but that fear.
this word is not enough but it will
have to do. It's a single
vowel in this metallic
silence, a mouth that says
O again and again in wonder
and pain, a breath, a finger
grip on a cliffside. You can
hold on or let go.


Stardust
Allen Heinrich

Say it takes
a billion turns
round a star
for the dust to settle
into the general shape
of a sphere (and just
for clarity here, let's
call it a planetary body).
Another two billion trips
through the cycle
for evolution to kick in
(atoms to molecules to
creatures and so forth).
Nine-tenths of a fourth
billion to circle the dawn
of what might become
us, and most of the last
million spent on the first
inklings of instinct and thought.
(Now we're taut, itching
to recognize features,
zeroing in on our
microscopic futures).

And all this time, with all this
must behind us having taken
so long, through so much-
how can it possibly
seem I am asking
too quickly for the stardust
of your touch?...