Stars in the Sky

I do believe that the Irish sky is clearest over Dublin in the middle of the night but over Derry it is most often clear in the late of the afternoon, when the fading sunlight turns golden and even the darkest stones and deepest stains are richly illuminated. Neither of these beliefs are necessarily true. But when I walk home from the local pub, usually circling the Sandymount Green, and I look upward at the heavens that our eternal God spun out from his creation, I see the millions of lights in the unending blackness. And when I remember the deepest memories of my childhood the sun is shining its warmth on post-school evenings and football games and races up the hills, but the night is huddled beneath a starless and moonless dome.

There is the obvious argument that slouching back toward my house in Dublin on nights of rain I do not look up and that my childhood memories are carved by tools sharper than cloud patterns over the North Atlantic, but beliefs are beliefs, and I know what I know.

_____________________________________
copyright 2004-2006 by Ira Socol

Comments

Brenda Clews said…
This is a poem. While I can hardly imagine you slouching, it was a fun reference. And there is something about our memories that combine everything into a single significant image that comes to represent all the complexities and ambiguities somehow maintained dynamically - without stillness, not static but nevertheless permanent. Even knowing that, that we created a shimmering symbol, we still know what we know.
8:40 AM, October 03, 2006
MB said…
I like this because there is something about skies that seem particular to place and time, and therefore to self in that context. They shape what we know. They shape our beliefs. The sky was working on me just this morning.
8:29 PM, October 03, 2006
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