Two Poems

Thoughts on a Star-Map
For Lee on his fiftieth birthday

Venus bright
in the dawn sky
of your birth-month.

Jupiter and Saturn
crossing the sky
from east to west.

          Think of light
travelling for a million years,
more than a million,
the astronomers' unimaginable
numbers and times,
but light which the eye sees:

Andromeda,
sister galaxy,
faint as a smudge of dust.

          Think of the names
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