Smoldering stars,
Cosmic bobs,
plumb the night,
assessing the depth 
of space.
They find Earth’s night
is shallow;
at the bottom of it
is life:
a tungsten-lit swamp,
thick with dogmatic rot,
where field mice forage,
and song-birds carve the sky
with hollow bones.
Or a city park:
semi-paved, solid ground
wrapped in the quilt of night,
embalmed with buckets of light
collected from the galactic glow
of countless distant deaths,
preserved by the fragile blessing 
of the Martyrs’ cross
that stands still and cold
above it all

apart from light or life.

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