Star Compass

artwork: ralph murre

Star Compass

by Sandy Stark

These birds look up.

They set their flight plan

by the luminous stars,

and when the sky map

tells them they’ve arrived,

they land and stay,

then reset their clocks

to that day star, the sun.

Amazing how they do it.

Pumped up marathoners,

high on hemoglobin and air,

they fly over continents

and oceans, often nonstop.

Instinct explains part of it,

astro-navigation, another.

Still, I wonder, what really

keeps them going? Is it

some stellar memory,

or more what it feels like

to fly at night—

for surely they are star-struck—

these birds of passage in star drift,

these birds of passage through light.

~ first published in Counting on Birds (Fireweed Press)

Magnolia Grandiflora

Magnolia Grandiflora
by Sandy Stark

My northern hybrid magnolia tree
is stingy with its leaves.
In spring the showy flowers come out first,
the greenery after, filling the spaces
where the browning petals drop.

Not so that big old Georgia tree
I used to climb in my grandmother’s yard:
it always stayed green, its huge, glossy
leaves taking on a darker sheen in June,
when the cup-like flowers poured out
a scent so creamy and sweet
it could make you drunk—
like my aunt, who drank herself
to sleep each night after she thought
her dead husband came back
as the new black cat on her doorstep,
wet, yowling, and thin.

She never dared to let him in,
but died alone in one of those
edge-of-town nursing homes
with rows of hedges and narrow trees,
the kind that don’t blossom,
but simply shed their leaves.


~ previously published in Counting on Birds (Fireweed Press)