Endless scattering of stars over beds of cloud-dotted dark.
For years the patch was tortured. Toiled over by sweating faces.
Until a black bowl remained where unending space meets mortal vision.
And each sleeping mind sows a seed.
Dots off distant light like pinpricks leaking through from heaven.
Each one covered over, crushed, softly, by a single hand.
And then, by a world full of hands, the night sky is made home
to an array of red and blue spots of planets,
white and yellow flashing stars, some fall
followed by golden tails as soon as shining,
some rise and fall steady and eternal as a sun, or its smile,
teaching us that living forever dies a little everyday,
and from a smoldering death, again, anew,
stronger than the day before.

Stars are sown, every one, by sleeping minds.
Content to trust dark soil to grow seeds with care.
Content with the work done, eyes tired.
Only those still awake so late start the harvest.

Hands like open eyes scour searching out and plucking up
clouds of mist and clarity alike, seeing in a distance worlds
spinning the same as ours, and the stars that burn them.

Sunlight now felt internally, like fear of smallness,
meaninglessness, afraid of failure, of lack of possibility.
Born in a black night. So those who ceased casting dreams
start harvesting others, forgetting the simple gifts of single stars,
and for personal comfort, shape them now into forms,
such as a bull, or a warrior, a dipper to carry black water
up to a raised heads miles below, and all to see bright
where the sun does not shine. Never to understand,
or learn, or love. But to distract until morning comes
and the colors are clearer. Stars gone except for one
no one can look at anyway as it frowns across space,
dotted by daydreams, sprouting the dark spots of birds
on a fresh light-blue bed.

Awakened people now see their dreams reshaped.
Converted to simpler, easier to harvest
than the single stars whose shining formed them.
Harvesters fill with worry over knowing and remembering each,
and now we all see constellations much more massive
than any of our individual dreams,
whose myths dwarf the dots comprising them,
so much so each shining spot seems blurred,
hazed, faded every day in light of our new breed of night.
Instead of planting them where seeds can grow,
dreams more likely drape dying trees once a year,
line highways and streets at the tops of wooden poles,
form consecutive rectangles of window patterns
lining a taller pillar of rectangle.

And under a huge dome built by human hands,
each dreamed star is a cell phone in a raised fist,
waving now as a constellation that only inspires fear
when peaked through the clouds,
because now no one looks up to see stars.
Or goes to sleep in search of dreams.

Now we look only to see.
And sleep only to sleep.