In The Forest, There Are Stars
Richard Widerkehr
The thick green-black branches can’t hide them,
whistling through cedar and fir trees. You’ve seen
one star drop as if torn from the forest.
Here so many stars jostle each other, falling toward you,
you forget what you were and how you came here.
Maybe by day on the road to the islands,
you drove past high bluffs to the end of a sandy spit,
or you skimmed over the white edges of rooftops.
Here sword ferns jut from the hillsides.
High fern-like branches fan themselves downward,
and stars soak you with their cold radiance.
The stars that were small and cold
in the sky are still small and cold. The branches
lift about them, hissing lightly.
Richard Widerkehr’s fourth book of poems is Night Journey (Shanti Arts Press). At The Grace Cafe (Main Street Rag) was his previous one. His work has appeared in Sweet Tree Review, Writer’s Almanac, Atlanta Review, and many others. He won two Hopwood first prizes for poetry at the University of Michigan, three Sue C. Boynton Contest awards, and first prize for a short story at the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference. He reads poems for Shark Reef Review.