stars

Imagine, if you will:Meradinis!The stuff myths are made of! The Turtle Island of the stars _ home planet to the fearsome and once legendary Corsairs. The very name of this world immediately grabbed the imaginations of young boys and girls, and universally mesmerize dreamers and romantics alike. The truth though was less romantic _ and as reality so often demonstrates in real life - instead rather ugly and brutal. The Corsairs were not corn-ball comics that went about with parrots on their shoulders, saying __rr!_ to everything they encountered. They were anything but. Behind the Corsairs and their culture lay a history fraught with a struggle to survive, a vengefulness and a cruelty _ and a drive to survive by preying upon others that struck fear into the hearts of neighboring fringe worlds.

Every time I stare into those eyes of yours, they shine like a mirror with the sharp edges, piercing trough every bit of my reflection. It makes me feel like a child lost in the woods. And all of a sudden I hear a song somewhere and a shiver runs down my spine. A song that I have heard somewhere before. A song that makes all my demons dance forcefully at once.

The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single start relieved the darkness behind the glass.

That black, maddening firmament; that vast cosmic ocean, endlessly deep in every direction, both Heaven and Pandemonium at once; mystical Zodiac, speckled flesh of Tiamat; all that is chaos, infinite and eternal. And yet, it's somehow the bringing to order of this chaos which perhaps has always disturbed me most. The constellations, in their way, almost bring into sharper focus the immensity and insanity of it all - monsters and giants brought to life in all their gigantic monstrosity; Orion and Hercules striding across the sky, limbs reaching for lightyears, only to be dwarfed by the likes of Draco, Pegasus, or Ursa Major. Then bigger still - Cetus, Eridanus, Ophiuchus, and Hydra, spanning nearly the whole of a hemisphere, sunk below the equator in that weird underworld of obscure southern formations. You try to take them in - the neck cranes, the eyes roll, and the mind boggles until this debilitating sense of inverted vertigo overcomes you...

How easily such a thing can become a mania, how the most normal and sensible of women once this passion to be thin is upon them, can lose completely their sense of balance and proportion and spend years dealing with this madness.

This is an ode to life.The anthem of the world.For as there are billionsof different stars thatmake up the skyso, too, are there billions of different humans thatmake up the Earth.Some shine brighter but all are made ofthe same cosmic dust.O the joy of beingin life with all these people!I speak of differencesbecause they are there.Like the different organsthat make up our bodies.Earth, itself, is one large body.Listen to how it howlswhen one human isin misery.When one kills another, the Earth feels the pang in itschest. When one orgasms, the Earth craves a cigarette.Look carefully,these animals are beauty spots that make the Earth__ face lovelier and more loveable.These oceans are the Earth__ limpid eyes. These trees, its hair.This is an ode to life.The anthem of the world.I will no longer speak of differences, for the similaritiesare larger. Look even closer. There may bedistances between our limbs butthere are no spaces betweenour hearts. We long to be one.We long to be in nature andto run wild with its wildlife.Let us celebrate life and living, for it is sacrilegious to be ungrateful.Let us play and be playful, for it is sacrilegiousto be serious.Let us celebrate imperfectionsand make existenceproud of us, for tomorrow isdeath, and this is an ode to life. The anthem of the world.

You whom my body longs for,where are you?In the stars, in the river, over the rainbow?Perhaps you hide in the shadows of the mountains,whistling in the wind through mighty peaksJust maybe you are in every corner of my beingawaiting invocation_ Manna Breathfill my life with your infinite power

As I thought of these things, I drew aside the curtains and looked out into the darkness, and it seemed to my troubled fancy that all those little points of light filling the sky were the furnaces of innumerable divine alchemists, who labour continually, turning lead into gold, weariness into ecstasy, bodies into souls, the darkness into God; and at their perfect labour my mortality grew heavy, and I cried out, as so many dreamers and men of letters in our age have cried, for the birth of that elaborate spiritual beauty which could alone uplift souls weighted with so many dreams.

Until a thing was seen, could it be said to exist? And if his eye through the telescope were the one that brought a certain star into existence, did not that make him a creator?

The splendor of God's work is the beauty of stars.

The stars of heaven gives light.

We shall take a star out of the skies and shall set thousands of worlds on fire...

The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the starsDid wander darkling in the eternal space.

When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.

It took less than an hour to make the atoms, a few hundred million years to make the stars and planets, but five billion years to make man!

The study of mathematics is apt to commence in disappointment... We are told that by its aid the stars are weighed and the billions of molecules in a drop of water are counted. Yet, like the ghost of Hamlet's father, this great science eludes the efforts of our mental weapons to grasp it.

CIRCLES OF LIFEEverythingTurns,Rotates,Spins,Circles,Loops,Pulsates,Resonates,AndRepeats.CirclesOf life,Born fromPulsesOf light,VibrateToBreathe,WhileSpiralingOutwardsForInfinityThroughThe lensOf time,And intoA seaOf starsAndLucidDreams.Poetry by Suzy Kassem

We are all star stuff.