Editor’s Note: This poem was commissioned to be a companion and friend to the poem “The Mismanagement of Stars” by Holly Day.
Content warning:
I saw a dark planet below, covered in desperate primordia, soon to be swallowed with brilliant, glowing ambition. So much changed over the course of centuries, a galactic mismanagement that transformed the night into a beautiful mosaic, glittering with light where the constellations found themselves befuddled by these new glowing cities.
This world, covered in spectral ebullience, was tied together by bows of light which bled with water and color across a floating dirt clod in the vacuum of space. Still, I couldn’t help but smile where the old sailors once journeyed with drunken boats and crinkled parchment while I guided them across dark waters. They weren’t the only ones though, my friends, so numerous in culture and life who bled and bowed through the ages until like the webs of night they grew under me with a burgeoning, industrial desire where the stars became theirs; a map by which their future was ne’er confined to the old gods of fate.
And so my friends forever saw the happy moon and new stars as their companions while they craned towards an endless expanse, pondering the dreams of someday when and what if …