“Acknowledgement Five” ~ a poem by Kara Briggs

In the summer when the earth pulls down the night like a blanket, I stand in warmth imparted from the sun into my paved driveway, and gaze skyward in the dark. I see the Milky Way and feel as if it is just beyond my reach.

Luminous clouds and smoke form a lizard in my sight, like those I witness lying still in the midday sun, now lying amid the night sky.

The stars so far away that they cannot be seen individually, like my ancestors from Sauk, Entiat, Chelan, Wenatchee, who go so far back in time that I cannot distinguish them all standing on these same mountains looking at these same stars.

We make our own meaning of these stars and the meteors that shoot toward our sky. We understand our own sky in our own terms, the familiar first star, the blue and red stars I see as cornflowers and poppies in a field, when once I only saw black and white.

The history of light is carried in these stars. The light in my eyes is thousands of years old. I am a witness to the history of this galaxy, whose light we depend upon to live on earth, light that shines even when I turn off my electricity.

The earth and stars are in permanent motion, like my body is in a permanent movement as long as I am alive. Standing in my driveway in the dark, I feel as if I could stand still forever looking skyward, but it is an illusion like the light in my eyes.

The earth pulls down the night’s star quilt, pulls down light that may not exist even now as I stand here. I exist between the stars out of my reach and the continual weight of gravity binding me to earth.

“Acknowledgement Five” is an excerpt from Kara Briggs’ Rivers In My Veins, published by Saint Julian Press, September 2024. Briggs is a writer and poet, Sauk-Suiattle tribal citizen and a descendant of the Yakama Nation, who lives on the Tulalip Reservation in Washington state. To hear more of Kara’s poems, join us at Village Books in Bellingham March 2 at 5pm for our Nature of Writing Speaker Series. Night sky photo by Andy Porter.