Julie and Catalin Write a Poem
It's been 14 years since we wrote this! I think about it once a while. It's nice!
Hi Catalin! Hope you are fantastic!
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Once a girl in my biology class asked if the sun had bones
I thought she was joking but she showed me a drawing
Red-blood-cell photons scattering from Helium patellas
Green sternum rose from the ends of sunflowers
It pulled at my ribcage like birdsong and nuclear fusion
Sporadic outbursts of pain from the lungs emerge
And swallows me into the brightness of beautiful devastation
At that moment i couldn’t contain my earth shattering screaming
The girl in my biology class smiled…because she knew
A pounding heart could never be replaced with a thousand bright suns
All the science in the world could never replace her bones
And when all the scientists would gather around her luminous body
A thousand pieces of construction paper could not capture who she was
Her will was that she never be reduced to a medulla oblongata
Her momentum was so much that I could have sprouted dragonfly wings for her
In the coldness of the room dandelions sprang from her eyes
Shocked into silhouettes against her smoldering skin
You could see conjectures of a million stars that passed
Fingertip trails of dark stalking light
Drips from melting icicles surrounded in efforts
A million heartbeats enveloping her somehow frozen tears
She couldn’t move through the mists of this blistering cold
Too many humans and too much distance between constellations
Forgetting her promise, she turned her bones for the other side
They didn’t tell her how cold it would be
Blood was reaching out, lungs were almost bursting
But then one perfect thought: remember that you came from nothing
Remember the times when all was stardust and nothing more
Remember what it feels like to draw the sun on her bones
The curiosity for all past events crossed her mind with a rush
Each moment a lantern, like a distant firefly in the black night