Creation Story (from Sol Lewitt, "Seven Pointed Star", 1996)
by Gordon Hilgers

    When the star ultimately exploded
    science had few means of realizing it

    but even in the lowest sensibility
    the nova, being new, was brilliant

    yet also fearful. Imagine waking up
    literally yellow as a lemon, your birth

    a blast of light. Oddly, around it,
    the void became a terra cotta mirror

    perhaps because space, too, stares shocked
    only to bow for its one eternal instant

    solidly into its opposite. After the bang
    a letdown: Suddenly adorned with awareness

    that dirt is the mother and father of life
    a corona of envious green enclothed

    for bare seconds, the split nature of space.
    But that demanded a cogent atmosphere

    upon which this green also merely reflects.
    Soon, a bricklayer's artifice mimicked you

    though a sense of fearfulness civilized it.
    Which is why, we suppose, that entering here

    you were compelled to wear your neon blue.






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