The Stars Are Spinning
Poets and Storytellers United
For your optional prompt this week, please return to one of your favourite Friday Writing prompts of the past, and to that same prompt write something new.
Friday Writings #105: ‘Starry, Starry Night’ from December 1, 2023, which I did not do then.
...your optional prompt this week is to be inspired by the song, ‘Starry, Starry Night,’ and/or by Vincent Van Gogh himself.
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| The Starry Night: Wikimedia Commons |
The stars are spinning.
My head is reeling,
drunkenness sans drink.
The stars accelerate,
spiraling, whirling,
gaining speed.
Or, it it me, racing
770 mph*
through space,
laying stationary on my back,
staring up at the wheeling stars?
I once read,
The stars are in constant motion.
Barnard’s Star, 4th nearest Earth,
will bridge the diameter of the moon
every 180 years.
A century,
a millennium,
to notice change
in the constellations.
Proccyon and Sirius strayed from the Hunter.
The Scorpion impotent, it’s stinger gone.
Leo, heartless, as Regulus heads northwest across the sky
to join the Crab.
I will be nothing but a mere speck of space dust then.
For now, I’m caught in the vortex,
spinning upward
outward,
one with the Universe,
or with Nothingness itself.
The Incredible Shrinking Woman.
Van Gogh’s skies were so much bluer.
Space is black.
And starless.
And lonely.
©2026 Lisa Smith Nelson. All Rights Reserved
*Earth's rotational speed at my location. At the equator it's approximately 1,040.6 mph, decreasing with latitude, and being 0 at the poles.
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