Kili: I always thought it (starlight) is a cold light, remote and far away.
Tauriel: It is memory, precious and pure… I have walked there sometimes, beyond the forest and up into the night. I have seen the world fall away and the white light forever fill the air.

                                                                             -The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (film)

ransom me from the cold echo of a star,
made fuzzy through the windshield,
fading further away through the halo
of a rain-washed streetlight.

follow it still, though it escapes my pains
by willing itself miles and miles away
only to wink in the auburn smear of a sunset,
but blur into oblivion in a camera lens.

bold and blazing you remain, a fire that
could scald my palms to ashes and parade
my corpse victoriously into the black holes
of barren emptiness, into midnight itself.

but you choose to be a spot on an astronomer’s
map, a torch at the end of a cave tunnel,
a blink that could almost be mistaken for a
plane moving through the atmosphere, transient.

tell me why you mask your glory in gray clouds and
arid city lights, but make yourself visible on
a cold night when I ask if there is anyone out
there, and look up to see you shimmer back at me?