Lessons From the Kissing Booth

I opened my poetry spinner this morning and it thought for a second and then gave me 19 poems on joy and youth. This is a little joke the poems are playing on me, you see, since I have been feeling so tired and just all worn through with holes, markedly less youthful and joyous than I probably should be. Too small for my skin and lightly blue.

One of the offerings was Whitman's "On the Beach at Night," which is the story of a little girl learning astronomy with her father while a storm rolls in and upsets the girl by covering the stars. He tells her not to cry, saying,

The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,

They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition,

Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,

They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again,

The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,

The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine.

 So, fine. I am not one to ignore the universe when it is telling me something, and evidently this is one of those times. We will weather this dimness the way we have weathered all the ones in the past, with soups and deep breaths and all the jokes that can fit in two hands. I don't have many skills, but I do have that one.