By a warm bonfire
Through a tube of lenses
I watch in wonder
The tinsel in the sky

A speck of salt on fading indigo
A lighthouse lost in time and space
There winks that ageing star

They say it could be my grandmother
Speaking in blips of a cosmic Morse code
Do I have the heart to listen and decipher?

I wonder

She was a bundle of love, granny
Would always tell me
You are an ocean of light my child
You are a bundle of bliss

Her voice still lingers
Even if she she hangs out in the sky these days
Having herself become an ocean of light
Locked Light years away.

She says, look…look my child
You are the same light as I am
You remember how I always told so
Don’t you?

I look at her
In awe,
She holds me
Rapt

And I wonder,

Do I burn brightly enough
For her to see me dazzle
From afar?

Do I enliven the hour
With the poetry of life
With the essence, the truth

There are days when I do
Many days when I don’t
Regardless, I still come to watch her every night
Thought the telescope, a gift from her when I turned 10

But she treats me alike either way
In failure and triumph
As if she believes in every atom of my being
In the stardust I am made of

The constant in the flux of my life
My guardian, my cheerleader
In the play of every day
She’s by the ringside, eternally,
Offering a sip of hope

She whispers

Brighter my child,
I am too far away,
And I left my glasses back at home
She says

You’re the infinite within a body
You’re the blueprint of the divine
Receive, Perceive, Believe
With all your soul

And at times when I lose faith in myself
It’s her faith that lights up my eyes
And I receive, perceive, and believe again
In the light she saw in me

A bonfire keeps me company every night
As I pore at the galactic canvas through the lenses

I hope
When the bonfire dies out
And I put my telescope away

I still shine bright
Holding the candle of curiosity
In love with the prospect of discovery

Still alive, and yearning to decode the secret of the stars
The geometry in the cosmos
The pulse of the flow of time

And that beloved star at a distance
Can still see me blink
From afar.