New Poem "From Stars Born on Earth" at Bewildering Stories

I've been writing poetry almost as long as I've been writing stories.  However, while I can fairly quickly write and edit a story, poetry tends to take me much longer.  Because poetry is so subjective and often emotional, I'm sometimes never sure when a poem is done - it might feel off to my ear when I read it aloud or look wrong to my eye, and so I will continue to work on it until there's nothing I'd like to change about it  at all (I won't say it's perfect, because as I writer, I feel that nothing is ever perfect - it's just done, LOL).

This most recently published poem of mine, "From Stars Born on Earth," is a poem that I've been working on for a long time.  I wrote the first draft about 17 years ago, when I was taking a trigonometry class in college that took place near twilight.  I'd enter the class as the sun was setting and leave as the last light left the sky.  The door of the class faced the mountains, and every night, there were a line of really bright lights that flared up against the skyline.  It reminded me of meteors, only in reverse - stars born on earth and being sent out as our challenge to the night sky.  As winter turned to spring, the days grew longer, and the class was no longer getting out when it was so dark.  The lights on the mountain stopped coming on when I was leaving the classroom.  And it made me wonder - what were those lights?  Who were they for?  And why had they stopped?

The answers were much less fanciful than my poem, of course, but I believe that everyday events can inspire ideas that resonate much more strongly than the events themselves.  The answers didn't matter to me - the wondering about them did, and where it led me.

So, I've been working on the poem ever since college, and finally decided that it was done.  I'm very grateful that the editors at Bewildering Stories liked it enough to share it with their readers, and I hope you enjoy reading this poetic effort of almost two decades in the making.