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Poem: Pull a sleeve over the face of the earth

By: Malcolm Carvalho

stars

The wolf did not like the stars in the sky.
He thought they were too bright.

The monkeys put a crane on the moon,
pulled the stars down to Earth
and lit them in a bonfire.

The next night they threw branches in the sky,
and shaped them so they looked like ghosts of the stars.

One night a few more stars appeared,
looking down at the monkeys and the bats.

The bats loved the spectacle, the monkeys were devastated.
They threw themselves between trees,
got the crane up again,
and went looking for the stars they had missed earlier,
the ones that now mocked them with their brilliance.

They never found them.

The next day they covered the earth with a black dome.

The bats knew the structure would rust and crumble soon.
The monkeys knew too. They only thought no one else did.

The bats punctured holes in the black roof,
and chipped away at them every night.

A month later the dome collapsed on a few sleeping monkeys.
The ones that survived went back to building bigger domes.
There were brighter stars they had to cover.

It’s been a year now; the domes will collapse any moment.

The monkeys have forgotten why they build domes.
The wolf picks one of the primates, throws them at the stars,
the rest recover from their amnesia.

The wolf has found trees that aren’t symmetrical,
and some that hiss while talking.
He has begun befriending the woodpeckers.

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