by Karen Skolfield

It’s not just the stars
these last mornings
I failed to see.
No light pollution.
My flashlight
the walk’s metronome.
Consider how no one takes
the stories of stars seriously
these days. The journalist
asked me what I thought
of my time in the military.
It’s the motion of a deer
that catches my eye,
makes me look back and see
a sunrise I almost missed.
Blazing and violent,
and once it’s gone,
no evidence it ever existed.