response to: Ishle Yi Park's "Distant Stars"

I listen
to this song and as she speaks words like hemming, and horizon, and fire... she says L train, and says that a thousand seagulls are flying, a lake somewhere, sunsets over bushwick, cursing singing and crying, she says, she speaks, the names of artists friends family who are the stars of her night as she writes:

We are like distant stars
we glimmer softly
and we live on our dreams
our small dreams
and we
dare to be beauty
to be beauty

she stomps her tongue a gun fires and a blade cuts she flowers the graves and she creates spaces where I see hope can be saved if only I listen and I speak with her words dotting my night as I write I search as if i am still young, as if i'm still young! she sings the names stars as they sit in different dark shifts passing like lights across the walls of our small apartments filled with so many bodies sometimes from somewhere the bricks sigh wishing they too were alive the beauty and strength of this song gives me knowledge gives me strong will the faith the hope I could not muster myself tonight as I cried searching for poetry from the insides, "because david will hold my mouth in his mouth" because we believe in poetry because we believe it will do more than set us free it will be, it will be...

we are like distant stars
we glimmer softly
and we live on our dreams
our small dreams
and we
dare to be beauty
to be beauty

*chorus and other parts of the poem are compiled from Ishle Yi Park's "Distant Stars"--the poet was listening to the poem recited by Ishle Yi Park as he wrote this response, thus her words dotted his song.