I’ve been missing my mom, especially since visiting with my family in Utah and attending my sister’s wedding. It has been two and a half years since she passed. But beyond the grave she dropped for me the breadcrumbs I needed to reconstruct my approach to life—and death.
I wrote this poem after an epiphany I had today—adding a new layer of meaning to a transformative moment. The realization that my family had seven living members before my mother passed away, like the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades star cluster, which was central to the experience. I’ve written about in the past. DM for more information if you’re curious. It’s a treasure of an experience that I won’t share here—not because it’s too sacred, but because words can’t do it justice.
Maybe a poem can beat prose, here.
Transcendence is a moment,
Just a beginning
Understanding is elusive—never conclusive
“There’s beauty in the mystery”
Memory unfolds layers, beneath layers,
epiphany begets meaning
Intelligent insight, that bluish light,
moves slowly, curiously, willingly
as an answered prayer, aloft in hazy skies,
vanishing to a point beyond.
Look closer.
Zoom in.
A cluster of lights!
Nodes on a spiral,
The question—marks the spot,
The arrow, pointing high,
Or a hook with seven stars.
Harvest time.
Seven sisters, in myth and life
—Seven members of a family—
now six.1
Pleione, the tricksome seventh,
lights the way home.
The earliest human story.
Of pursuit, the chase eternal.
Who is seated there, beyond?
Do majestic beings watch there, from afar,
Are we those architects, nostalgic for when everything felt so new?
We can hear them
If we listen.
If we seek.
The end and beginning live as one
In the stellar nursery.
We seek, once we find;
We find when we seek.
Pleione, Mother, lead me home.
I’m lost at sea in the quantum foam.
Pleione is a “tricksome” star, masking her light in a slow cosmic dance. Once seen clearly as the seventh sister in ancient myth, she has drifted into the glare of her neighbor, Atlas, blurring into one. She spins to the brink of tearing herself apart, periodically exhaling veils of gaseous shell and dust that make her pulse and fade. She sits precisely on the knife-edge of human vision—vanishing when stared at directly, and shimmering again only when we look away.
❤️A 'tricksome star' and these ending lines...
We seek, once we find:
We find when we seek.
Pleione, Mother, lead me home.
I'm lost at sea in the quantam foam.
Cael. This was beautiful and I’m very sorry your loss. Grief is just proof of how deeply we loved, I think.