We are all made of stars.
-- Moby

I.
Miracles pervade this time of year,
at least our perception of them,
invoked by tradition and stories
of Jesus’ birth, the Star in the East.

Do we use the word too much?
What is a “miracle”?
The improbable or impossible
rendered true, by divine providence –
manna from Heaven, a burning bush,
the loaves and fishes?

Or is it statistics,
a million-to-one shot or worse:
“I won the lottery - it's a miracle!”
Are miracles what we want to see:
the Virgin Mary on the skin of an eggplant?

Or are they relative?
Does one person’s good fortune
drive another’s misery?
Clarke told a story
of a space expedition
to a planet whose whole civillization died
when their sun went nova –
that star, their sun, the same one
that hung shining over Bethlehem
that first Christmas night.


II.
Stars are miracles,
nearly perpetual, self-contained furnaces
spattering the sky with tiny points
of heat and light.
If we look far enough back,
We will see the very first moment,
refracted in our lens,
painted by radio signals,
The Beginning.

Everything strings out from that moment
on luminescent threads,
impossibly long, impossibly thin,
and like beads on each one,
is our history, glittering in expanding light.

What matters is matter.
The real miracle is we’re still here,
made from star-stuff,
with all our wonders and atrocities,
singing to each other
our million songs, signals through the void,
as we blaze away
in our own firmament.

12/17/2002

Posted on 12/18/2002
Copyright © 2026 Bruce W Niedt