Lois Marie Harrod

First Star

Lois Marie Harrod

All matter created in the Big Bang was mostly hydrogen (75%) and helium (25). The first stars evolved without the heavier elements, were huge and disappeared quickly. Some days I want to go back to my beginning, back to my first star, the ones astronomers are searching for, my first glance after the Big Bang, glint uncontaminated by lithium, spark without carbon or magnesium or calcium, star unstained by iron, oh, how simple I was— first sun before my sun, before the stars, before the galaxies and all their wars, first star that flashed and was dark, a prophecy, the star that made me, that wink in the bucket of stars, flash, sputter, shimmer, trace, spark, splinter wick flicking as the flame before earth began its slow spinning around my familiar, the sun, huge this morning on the horizon, a great wound in the firmament. How it seems to ache— haven’t I always made things bigger than they seem?— and now these patches of light flickering on the birch, what did I do my first three days, was it this? Matter forgets almost everything— first star, second, fifth, generations of light, there was I, every sun as old as the first, every particle, 13.8 billion years, the clock I carry in my wrist.

Lois Marie Harrod’s Spat was published in June 2021. Her 17th collection Woman won the 2020 Blue Lyra Prize. Nightmares of the Minor Poet appeared in June 2016 (Five Oaks); her chapbook And She Took the Heart, in January 2016; Fragments from the Biography of Nemeis and How Marlene Mae Longs for Truth (Dancing Girl Press) appeared in 2013. A Dodge poet, she lives in New Jersey and is published in literary journals and online ezines from American Poetry Review to Zone 3. Online link: www.loismarieharrod.org