Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

As a kid, my best friend’s older brother Lonnie was the smartest dude I knew; I mean smarter than our teachers. He once explained Einstein’s Theory of Relativity to me in such a way that for a flash of a second, I actually understood. He was like my neighborhood’s Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson. So, when he came home from school one day, and pronounced that if we looked into the sky and concentrated hard enough that we could see right through the blue firmament and into deep space, no one challenged him; we all just went outside and stared up for a long while, squinting while visoring our foreheads, until our necks hurt, then silently, one by one, went back inside to watch MTV.

I have no idea where he got such a notion or his source, I only know this: that day Lonnie instigated my sense of wonder, and that evening, when I should have been sleeping, like millions, maybe even billions before me, for the first time, I felt compelled to look up at the stars. I have been examining the cosmos ever since.

Is there any other mystery that has ignited our imaginations, that has launched questions about our origins or the possibilities of interstellar phenomena like the Milky Way? In China, it’s called the Silver River. In Japan, River of Heaven.

About five years ago, I purchased a pair of high-powered binoculars, the sci-fi sounding Celestron Skymaster 2500, that allows me to see the moon’s basins and craters with great clarity. If you have ever visited my Instagram account, you have seen the fruits of my passion. With these binoculars, I am able to observe deep-sky objects that further my wonder about our place in the galaxy. There is something comforting in knowing that what connects us to generations before is this grand mystery, one by which we have created stories to fill our fathomless and infinite curiosity.

Today’s poem ponders the constellations as a possible source of both healing and reinvention. This poem reminds us we are not alone. The speaker invites us to create points of connection, and, like the ancestors before us, to create tales we can hold close, to keep us steady in each other’s presence.

In Light of Stars
by Bruce Willard

If you sit without motion 
starlight makes holes in the night 
sky, liquid strained 
so many years in silence, 
the milky essence of childhood 
streaks through. 

What is there to say 
of what binds us? 
What passes through 
the night without changing 
burns out, wants someone 
to burn with. Brother, 

it's not for us to relive the bruises 
the body becomes, 
unseen, unknown. 
I hope you have been drawn 
someplace beautiful, held 
by someone tight 
in the creamy light of the moon. 
There are so many stars 
looking for a constellation 
to join. Tonight, 
let us partner the light, 
imagine a line that connects 
each astral point, 
makes a story 
we can tell ourselves 
when it is dark 
or beginning to rain.

“In Light of Stars” by Bruce Willard from IN LIGHT OF STARS © 2021 Bruce Willard. Used by permission of Four Way Books.