Poetry from Kentucky: Dear Blue Hill’s Stars

By Billy Cosby

Tonight, whoever watered your fresh sky
set the nozzle wide and the evening’s cheeks
wear a dark blush with glimmering shoe-flies
needling clouds away I hope for weeks
because yours are wild stars tonight, mustangs,
thousands in Olympic golds and bronzes
arm-wrestling for space, enduring pains
as bright, tight karats: spacial nuances.
Tomorrow, will clouds rake your shards away?
Gosh, I hope they stagger on my eyes’ roots
because “starlight, starbright” begins a fray
tempered by your percussion, sightly flutes.

With warmth, Billy, presently of Blue Hill
p.s. – listen close: you ssshhh the night still

Billy Cosby: I’m a Kentucky transplant (going on six years) from Virginia and I’m in my tenth year of teaching in middle school.  The part of my personality that makes me (at least) an average Language Arts teacher in middle school does find its way into my personal writing.  I sometimes lack couth and occasionally insert a Kentucky drawl into my poetry, but still my thoughts are as sincere as my love for dogs – generally, the focus of my writing.  I’ve had one other poem published, not shockingly, “If a Labrador Pees in the Forest,” in the magazine, BARk (Sept. – Oct. 2012).

This poem is among the entries for the Society’s 2012 Poetry Competition.