What are your favorite star poems?

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are…

Are you an inscrutable mask, a cold, inanimate refusal?

And yet with neither love nor hate,
Those stars like some snow-white
Minerva’s snow-white marble eyes
Without the gift of sight.
–Robert Frost, “Stars“

Or a flaming furnace of life?

Myriads with beating
Hearts of fire
That aeons
Cannot vex or tire…
I know that I
Am honored to be
Witness
Of so much majesty.
–Sara Teasdale, “Stars“

Are you a reflection of the Divine?

Oh Lord my God, when I in awesome wonder
consider all the worlds thy hands have made
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed…
–Carl G. Boberg and R.J. Hughes, “How Great Thou Art“

Or are you too impersonal for that?

The God of curved space, the dry
God, is not going to help us, but the son
whose blood spattered
the hem of his mother’s robe.
–Jane Kenyon, “Looking at Stars“

Do you represent a better possibility?

Places among the stars,
Soft gardens near the sun,
Keep your distant beauty;
Shed no beams upon my weak heart.
Since she is here
In a place of blackness…
–Stephen Crane, “Places Among the Stars“

Or do you point us back to earth?

I am wholly willing to be here
between the bright silent thousands of stars
and the life of the grass pouring out of the ground.
–Wendell Berry, “On the Hill Late at Night“

More star poems here. Star photos courtesy of HubbleSite. Artwork courtesy of my daughter. Poetry Friday is at A Year of Reading today.