College, Death, and Starlight

Free verse poem

One wonderful thing about having an older sibling
Is that they’ve done all the scary stuff first.
They learn it all
Make all the mistakes
And are there to guide you when it’s your turn.

Before I left for college
My brother put his hands on both my shoulders
His face grim,
Haunted.

He said he had to warn me,
with a tremor in his voice
like an old sea captain
whose eyes had beheld krakens
lurking just beneath the waves.

I expected a lot of things
Tips and cautionary tales
like I’d heard and read about online.

“Don’t take 7AM classes”
“Always go to office hours”
“Don’t accept drinks from strangers”

But his words were not
Any of these.

He looked me dead in the eyes
And with full conviction he warned:

“You can’t see the stars down there.”
And he was right.

For so much of our lives we’d lived
where starlight bathed the desert.
When I left home
The beaches in San Diego were beautiful
But the night skies were empty.
And in place of the divine darkness,
they glowed with a constant red-orange hue.

-

The shattering thing
about losing an older sibling
Is remembering all the firsts they will never see.
Partners, weddings, children, successes, failures
Both his own and for me.

How young are we both
So much left to have done
So much left to have said

Sometimes I tell myself
he's just gone off to college again.
I'll see him this summer
when classes let out.

This time instead of earthly machines
He studies divine ones.
He learns how the currents move
in the switchboards that turn the planets.
He learns the code that built every mountain and foothill
Down to every grain of sand
He learns that light and heat from the sun
That warm our skin and grow our crops
Are just the Creator's love, manifest.

He calls and tells me
"It's so beautiful.
But please;
Take your time"

My brother will come home
some summer's evening
When all my years are spent.
He'll ask me if I'm scared to go
But he already did it first.
How could I be scared
When he's already there?

When I see him again, he'll warn me
Both hands on my shoulders
With a grin on his face, fully sincere
"You're not ready for this," he'll say,
"But you can see all the stars up here."

Photo by Klemen Vrankar on Unsplash