Meteor, April 2020
by Amy Miller
(published in Sweet Lit, 2020)
In the year of our plague, we saw a light. Like a plane on
fire, west in the sky, just after sunset when Venus and the
moon were trying so hard to touch. There, flashing on the
lids of the trash cans—sudden, moving, in flight—
something meeting its end, crashing to earth. I looked up
and said What the hell. Not Glory, not Thank you.
Sometimes they say
a mixed blessing, which means
you’re screwed. Or Careful
what you wish. I only wished
that the rest of that rock
would miss us.
Starlight, not night, and the leaves on the maple so tender a
green you know most of them won’t make it—frost coming
again. Light, light, green, and the blue of not quite night.
Our night lit by this startle. Or spike.
The hardest thing
is how the fever
keeps making you think
it’s over, then flares
again, a fire that comes
just before sleep.
Then sleep flies off
to somewhere far
from your troubled
crown of night.
After a shock, sometimes you look back at the place it
happened as if it bled some lingering print. I still look there,
wonder if it landed, the gouge, the burn. Mixed. Be careful.
Stars wheel down, a slow newsfeed. The story is
developing. I’m out here with no mask, big sky, big dare,
alone. And aren’t we all just lone pillars, the billions of our
parts improbably combining, surviving? Like those lights,
dragging all their lives behind them out of the dark.
For me, this poem perfectly encapsulates those strange times during 2020 when things here on earth were so awful, but there were so many wondrous things happening in the universe.
I love how Amy Miller not only uses stanzas, but provides more space in her poem by changing the shpae of her stanzas. And, yes, I very purposefully used "space" there.
The first line grabs the reader. Miller uses "plague," a much scarier word than pandemic. And she uses that word to replace the word "Lord," comonly used in the phrase, "In the year of our Lord." By starting with that well-known phrase, she provides comfort. But by replacing Lord with plague, she reminds us how frightening that time was.
The use of the word "our," and then "we" (oh my gosh, we aren't even out of the first line yet!) further pulls the reader in. This is not just the speaker--it's all of us. And that really was what was happening--the pandemic touched all of us.
The poem then delves into fear. "Like a plane on fire" is a horrifying image, and that's what the poet is recalling. And we are with her there, in the past--please do not let that meteor hit earth. Trash cans, fever, a late frost--all references that increase the sense of foreboding.
Then the ending, and how I love this ending! The speaker tells us she is out there in the night and is not wearing a mask. Yes, she's alone, but in the spring of 2020 not wearing a mask felt like, as Miller puts it, a big dare (love this, too, rather than "daring). She pulls it all together by stating that we are all alone, even while we are together, and then she compares us to meteors in such a fantastically creative way to describe a meteor.
I do love to be pulled into a poem right away and then left with an image at the end that really sticks with me. This poem does both!
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