Chasing Stars

Brass monkey weather – high
on Dunstable Downs, spotting
shooting stars. From a thermos
in his car, we drank hot chocolate...
then he made fun of my ‘moustache’;
the spitting image of Hitler’s.

The grass – damp with evening rain
as we sat...writing with our fingers
love-poems on each other’s backs
like a lazy southern drawl...spoken
with the body’s slang and the rhyme,
reason and rhythm of the heart.

A perfect night – we scoured the skies
as the clouds, finally, broke;
he taught me all the constellations –
turned out he was a Sagittarian, and me
a Leo...a match made in heaven.

“On the horizon is the Plough,”
he said. “Overhead, it’s Orion,
the hunter; that line of three stars
is his belt, and watch Sirius flash
orange, red and green!”

No shooting stars for us, but what
did we care? We made it to the moon
at least, in his 1966, home-sprayed
cream and pink, Zephyr Zodiac

but we stopped chasing stars
a long time since and yet, we’re still
in love, of sorts – I guess. Things change
though, like ‘the where’, and ‘the when’.
And ‘the why’... most of all.