Kill a Star, Burn a Sacrifice by Retta Lewis

Kill a star,
Burn a sacrifice;
Stir a time,
Surrender a memory.
 
We always thought we knew
More about each other than we did,
But we could never know enough.
And, of course, there were many distractions
That often made us doubt.
 
But the stars were in our eyes—
We bargained for them daily,
And fought beyond all hope.
 
We built futures on pieces of nothing
That seemed like more than enough,
But we lost even the illusion of it.
 
It was into this bruising atmosphere
That we’d wandered,
And thought we’d found our way.
 
For how long did this seem true of us—
Those three years that we held on?
 
It was always within our power
To level it all to ashes,
To bypass all the stages of grief,
And get on with the business of death.

We grappled with the ending,
And even doubted that it could—
All the while pretending—
But I always knew it would.
 
Inside my head a story
Unraveled in a day.
It was not what I was thinking,
But who was thinking then?
 
We were sorting out our options
Up until the final hour—
Until all the voices ceased,
And the silence began to speak—
Until all the answers
That could come to me, came.

About the Poet:

Retta Lewis lives in South Carolina.  Her work has appeared in Ephemeral Elegies, Caveat Lector, CC&D, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Penumbra Literary and Art Journal, and Rigorous.