Your Constellation Or Mine?

a poem

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

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The stars don't care about you
but I understand why

you stand on this unimportant
Earth, and convince

yourself that a billion galaxies 
celebrate your birth.

When measured against
the vastness of the universe,

we humans are as minor
as houseflies—and nobody

honors any species of fly.
Nobody looks to the night

skies and declares that a few
random and distant stars

outline a constellation named
Bottle Fly. But why not

praise the flies?  They're second 
only to bees in the amount

of plants pollinated.
So the next time you sneeze,

you might be sneezing
the black pepper that's made

from the peppercorn
that was pollinated by

a fly. And what about
the bloodier service

that the flies provide?
They find the carcasses 

of animals and chew
the flesh down to bone.

They help the dead decompose.
Flies aren't grim reapers.

They're nature's housekeepers.
But, wait, hold on, I think

that I just crafted an ode to flies. 
Are you surprised? Maybe

you should forget the stars
for a moment and watch

that one fly flutter against
the window pane. Unlike

the endless number of stars
that have died, that fly

is alive. Hell, the stars
that you claim as your stars

are light years away—
they're incomprehensibly distant—

and could've exploded many
centuries ago. It could be ten

or twenty generations or more
before the light from your star's

destruction reaches Earth—
before your descendants

can look through a telescope
and see that your star

has become dust. Ah, my friends,
we mortals are constructed

of dust. But that realization 
makes us small. So we invent

a vocabulary to feel
more important than a fly.

We write messages on the sky
—we must, we must—

and pretend it was the stars
that drew those words for us.