Of Extinguished Stars

As I was gazing at the stars,
in the silence of the evening,
I began to muse.
As is the penchant
of gazers.
As I looked upwards
at the cold light, frost's fire,
I remembered a phrase
that soured my gaze
and left me chilled.

"Every star that we see,
in the sky so bright and clear,
shining with hope to light the night,
is dead.
Gone.
The light we see is late!
Thousands
and thousands of years late.
We see the light of vanquished giants,
of souls long past.
The plea of passed, forgotten ghosts,
now nothing."

I mused on all the stars I saw,
hanging above, aloft, serene,
and mused.
Upon the planets that they snared,
Upon the worlds that flourished there,
Upon the dead, the lost, the gone,
the Nothing.
And reflected that the light I saw was merely a marker.
A gravestone.
And all that ever existed there
was Nothing.
And the weight of the weightless stars,
so beautiful, so beautiful,
began to crush me.

And in my anguish I fixed my gaze,
my torn gaze,
upon the spaces between the stars.
Where nothing shone.
And I envisioned the stars,
that no doubt were there
aloft in the void.
And I envisioned the ones,
that would be.
Which star would see our star,
I wondered.
Which star that had not yet come to be,
thousands of years in the future,
would support the life that would turn an eye to the heavens,
and ruminate on the light of a forgotten star
that once supported me
and now is returned to the inky black,
the void that bore it,
and is Nothing.
As I would be.

And as this icy conviction took hold,
and as I mourned for eventual destruction,
my gaze,
my torn gaze,
was drawn anew.
Back to the star I behold at the first,
and dreamt of long forgotton worlds,
it had moved.
It was not a star at all,
It was a satillite.
Drifting in our orbit, serene, aloft.
With a purpose I was not to know,
or to care.
But purpose.
Beaming down information to a living, breathing world,
in the eternal orbit around the heart,
careless of the vanquished suns.
And I laughed,
and laughed,
and laughed.