Unattainable by Andrea Festa

My father stood beside the wilted orange tiger lilies
on the side of our house. So small and fragile
compared to the grand spectacle in the sky.
A meteor shower, a celestial trajectory of cosmic
debris. Thousands, bright and fast, cascaded
from the infinite galaxy to Earth.
Earth, where my father and I stood, awestruck.
I squinted to take it all in, despite my poor vision.
"You'll never see this again in your lifetime," he said.
His voice was ominous, echoing off the siding.

I fought to find the features of his face in the dark, grasping
the unattainable, like catching a shooting star in a jar for keepsake.

About the Poet:

Andrea Festa is a paralegal by day/writer by night residing in Philadelphia. A graduate of the University of the Arts with a BFA in screenwriting, prose poetry is her forte. She is the recipient of the Dr. Frederick P. Cornell Award for Excellence in Writing (2011), the Writing for Film and Television Faculty Award for Excellence (2011), The Giulio & Carina Novelli Memorial Award for Excellence in Liberal Arts (2011), and The University of the Arts Poetry Award (2011). She has not been published and hopes to make writing, rather than 9 to 5 office drudgery, her full-time profession.