Starchild: For Garry Shider
- Starchild*For Garry Shider
Newborn, diaper-clad, same as a child, That’s how you’ll leave this world. No you won’t die, just blast off.
Legs for rockets, bones separating like boosters. Guitar: a lover, slanted in a hug, plucked, Scratched, strummed. You will raise
One finger, on the one, for the one, Then lift like a chorus of neck veins, All six strings offering redemption.
The black hole at the center Of the naked universe will respond With a flash of light: comets, whistles,
Glowing noisemakers, bang, bang. Roofs everywhere cracking, tearing, Breaking like water.
Thomas Sayers Ellis, an associate editor of Callaloo, is an instructor of African American literature and creative writing at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He recently received the MFA in creative writing at Brown University, a few years after he co-founded the Dark Room Writers Collective. He is a co-editor of On the Verge: Emerging Poets and Artists and one of the emerging poets collected in Take Three. His work has also been published in Agni, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, The Harvard Review, and Ploughshares.
Footnotes
* Reprinted by permission of AGNI and the author. This poem originally appeared in AGNI #38 (Fall 1993).
