Stardust

Friday, January 10

Today’s post is by guest author Heather Johnston. The text is the poem From This the Strength by Fred Lape, published in Scribners in January 1938.

The fog had made a twilight on the water.
The shore rocks rose, ugly and aged teeth
Of earth, discolored at their bases where
The tide had ebbed. Upon their tops the gulls
Stood silently facing the hidden sea.


Two boys with garbage came to the land's edge.
The gulls rose in the mist, circling the boys,
Crying about their heads, gliding down air.
The boys leaned out and slung their load of waste
Over the rocks. Shrieking the gulls swept down.
Their bodies wove together by the cliff.
The strongest found the food. The others swung
In circles waiting turn, or poised on water,
Beating their wings like butterflies, or clinging
To the wet rocks, let the slow roll of surf
Surge under lifted wings. One gull flew out
With red meat in his bill. The fog received
Him in its arms; only the white tail shone,
A comet curving down the sphere of mist.
Two gulls settled upon the cliff again.
They stretched and shook their wings, and folded them
Feather by feather to their sides, like old
Housewives storing their linen into drawers.


The boys went back. The gulls had cleaned the waste
And one by one soared off into the fog.
The ugly was consumed, gone to the bone.
The sinew, feather, wing, to the sure grace
Of flight, the strength to beat against the air
And take the strong wind currents of the sky.

When I read the title of this poem – From This the Strength – I expected it to be a Christian poem about finding strength in God. I was surprised then to find that the source of the strength in this poem is garbage! But of course, the world is garbage recycled again and again. We may as well not call it garbage, since it’s what makes up the circle of life, and in fact the entire universe.

Carl Sagan said, “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.” And indeed, the NASA Astrobiology Institute (which I just learned exists when looking up the Sagan quote – another surprise!) confirms this. You are made of stardust. The idea of stardust might sound whimsical, but the stardust is not magic fairy dust, it’s the debris blown off of an expanding star or the ashen remains of an exploded star. And we get the strength to run and jump – and to ponder the nature of the universe – by recycling even more stardust! Perhaps it is a bit whimsical after all.