Starfire

Stop long enough for a ray of golden light to slant through trees and trick you out of your skin.

Stay long enough for this love to catch you up.

When it finally does, turn your face to beauty and surrender to your own weeping.

When that happens, human skin slides off as a luminescence lights up cascades of scales, fur, claws, beating wings, soaring flight, slithering belly.

All that’s needed is a slant of sunlight through trees, a subtle change in the trickling of stream-flow, to trick a human out of her familiarity, to land even momentarily into an entirely different realm.

Sometimes, constellations land into our veins, illuminating their branching networks with ancient starfire.

When that happens, nothing is ever the same again.

Image: Philip Tonkyn ‘Goddess Tree Glastonbury Abbey’ in Earth Pathways Diary 2022