Morning

The sun has not yet risen and morning is slowly awakening the landscape.  A dull grey is beginning to emerge as outlines become visible and shadows retreat back into their daytime hiding places.  The sky to the west is dark with a few resilient stars protesting the approaching dawn.  To the east, the horizon is melting from black to blue high in sky, and from blue to orange along the horizon.

The world is still stretching and waking up and lazily approaches the coming day.  Movements are not unified into motion.  Unique movements of animals appear separate, each unique and lonely.  Isolated actions that stand out so much in the stillness that they demand individual attention.  There are no pairs or partnerships in the dawning of the day, only solitary things, each a detached fragment separate from the whole.

The pregnancy of the day is approaching its birth and it feels as if the day is holding it's breath in an expectant pause waiting for the sun to break free of the horizon.

A Jealousy of Stars

That star, the first one out, sitting haughtily on the horizon is not a star at all.  It's a planet.  It's Mars.  In Roman mythology, Mars was the god of war and second only to the god Jupiter, king of the gods.  Perhaps that is why Mars arrives so early in the night sky.  He is an impostor, a poser and a thief attempting to swell his own importance by greedily collecting the wishes of the lonely and desperate who come to him in error.

Unfortunately for those dreamers, their wishes fall on deaf ears, and in the time that it has taken those sad and forgotten few to voice their desires, the first star has appeared somewhere near the zenith, anxiously awaiting those hopes and dreams to be spoken, sadly disappointed to be overlooked.

If the planets were gods then surely, the stars must be something else.  Something above the gods, imbued with power to fulfill the dream of a troubled planet, yet angry at the stolen hopes wasted on a deceiving impostor.

Soon, the second star, followed by a third and fourth.  A handful will arrive followed by an army of stars that riot across the night sky.  Cloudless, endless patterns emerge where the many take the place of the few.  Eventually, the dream star, the wishing star, is nothing more than an unrecognizable dot amidst the ocean of light, lost to those desperate dreamers.