Sometimes, a poem can be just a whiff of a suggestion. Robert Hayden’s “Stars” made me wonder what it was like for the ancestors, looking up at the sky, eons ago, wondering.
How shall the mind keep warm
Save at spectral
Fires — how thrive but by the light
Of paradox?
Long ago, ancestors who hunted with spears imagined the constellations as men who hunted with spears. Not so long ago, ancestors who were enslaved followed the stars to freedom.
The poem is just a suggestion, almost a passing thought, about how the stars must have talked to those who came before.
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