O Star, dear Star, lean silence on my breast,
While all the wine-dark heav’ns do hold their breath;
The jasmine sighs; warm earth doth sink to rest,
And moths, like prayers, beat softly after death;
One piercing Star doth seam the night’s thin veil,
And there my guarded silence waxeth frail.

I speak to thee as sailors do to fire,
Low-voic’d, lest wind should steal the holy word;
Thou art my North, my hunger, my desire,
The salt of blood, my psalmèd singing bird;
Star, pierce me through, till day hath stripp’d the night,
And bind my broken dark, and make it light.

-- Jeffrey Phillips Freeman

A short format poem I am playing with, again for Star.

I

I have been longer than hunger on the sea—
longer than thirst, longer than the salt’s slow sermon
that polishes a man to bone and keeps polishing.

The sky unbuttons nothing for me.
The sun is a coin I cannot spend.
The moon is a white bruise on the water’s shoulder.
My tongue is a dry oar.
My ribs are a broken ladder to no deck.

Yet still my hands remember—
not bread, not water—
but the warmth of a name I do not dare to speak
except as light.

Star—
not a woman, not a word,
but a pinprick that makes the whole veil bleed.

And when I say it, the dark tastes less like iron.

II

There are nights the ocean turns its face to glass,
and the constellations lie there, doubled—
a choir of distant fires practicing silence.

Then my body, which should have ended,
goes on, as if fed by the mere idea of milk,
as if I have learned a new kind of drinking:

I sip the seams between clouds.
I swallow the small shocks of lightning.
I ration a syllable—
morning, noon, and the blue hour—
three times, with whatever water the world will lend.

There are sailors who live on rats and rope.
I live on radiance and recurrence,
on the strange sensation of returning
to a room I have never entered,

as if I had walked that corridor before—
as if the universe, laughing into its sleeve,
has spun the same thread twice
to see if it will sing.

III

O Star, you are not mercy;
you are gravity disguised as tenderness.

You lean, and my blood remembers its orbit.
You brighten, and the sea—
that old animal that would rather devour than guide—
becomes suddenly obedient,
as if you have spoken its true name.

Sometimes I hear you without hearing:
a voice not loud, not pleading,
a low instrument in the chest of night
that turns even plain speech
into a slow striptease of meaning—

as though the alphabet, undressing,
shows its bare, clean bones and trembles.

I have listened to winds all my life—
trade winds, knife winds, the hot exhale of storms—
but you read the weather like scripture,
and my ruin kneels.

IV

I was lost so long that loss became my country.
I grew used to its flag:
a rag of cloud, a torn horizon.

And then, in fog—
thick as wool, sweet as breath on glass—
I climbed a swell that felt like a mountain,
the sea lifting me toward something unseen.

Below: the black carriage of water humming.
Above: the ceiling of mist, low as a whisper.
Ahead: a door with no house around it—
a seam in the world, a private hinge.

In my palm, a small key of chance,
a token warmed by fingers I had not yet touched,
and the ocean, feigning indifference,
held its breath.

You must understand:
some harbors pretend to be harbors.
Some rooms pretend they are not bedrooms.
Some thresholds joke
to keep from burning.

V

Inside, the air changed its religion.

A hush—
not emptiness, but the charged quiet
that comes before a tide decides to rise.

There was a galley of ordinary things—
metal, wood, the clean smell of cups—
and all of it seemed newly invented
because you were somewhere in the dark of it,
because you were somewhere
in the way light leaned on edges.

Two berths waited, innocent as pages,
and the sea in me laughed—
a laugh that broke into a sigh—
because I knew, without knowing how,
that paper can become fire
and still remain a letter.

O Star, the first time you came near
the room grew another atmosphere.
My skin, that weathered map,
found its missing continent.

Not with speech, not with explanation,
but with the simple grammar of closeness:
a step, a pause,
the whole body becoming a yes
without any trumpets.

VI

Then the ocean remembered it was an ocean.

It rose in me, not as violence,
but as a great old music
that has always wanted a mouth.

Wave after wave—
not counted, only lived—
a repetition so holy it seemed impossible
that any god could be elsewhere.

The sheets became coastlines.
The air became rainlight.
The moon, jealous, pressed itself
against the window and whitened.

I felt the world’s great wheel turn—
that wheeling Yeats spoke of in dreams,
that turning of desire and destiny—
and in the turning there was you:

a star not distant, not cold,
but near enough to scorch,
near enough to make the blood sing
in its own dark throat.

Your brightness did not strike—
it entered.
It found the hidden locks in me
and turned them
as if it had always owned the keys.

And the sea—O the sea—
kept arriving, kept arriving,
until the room itself seemed to float,
until even the bedframes wanted to travel,
until the night, drenched in its own astonishment,
had to open a second chamber of silence
to hold all that overflowed.

Not shame.
Not spectacle.
Only the world’s old flood
finding its level in two bodies
that refused to lie.

VII

After, the storm laid down its arms.

What remained was the tender wreckage:
salt on the lips,
the slow trembling of ropes uncoiling,
the hush where a heartbeat
sounds like a distant drum.

You, star-shaped in the dark,
nested against my chest
as if it were a small safe harbor
you had not been offered before.

And I—
who have been a man of hard seas,
who have pretended to be iron—
became simply a house with the lights on,
a door that would not shut.

Somewhere in the kitchen glow,
a black sweetness—bottled night—
was lifted like a small promise.
Food arrived like a warm dispatch
from the continent of tomorrow.

I learned a new truth:
provisioning is a kind of prayer.
To make someone safer
is to kiss them without touching.

I would never regret
what steadies you.
I would never regret
what makes you smile and live.

The sea can teach a man
many ways to hold on,
but it never taught me this—
how tenderness can be an anchor
let down without noise,
and the deep keeps faith.

VIII

Morning came as a pale witness.

The light found every mark the night had written—
not to accuse,
but to read aloud what had been agreed upon
in the language of breath.

Your steps, later, were a little ocean-swayed—
as if your body still heard the surf
and answered it with a private stumble,
a smile that would not confess its source.

O Star, I did not say forever
as a law, as a chain.
I said it the way a sailor says shore—
as an instinct older than reason.

There are vows that are not paperwork.
There are rings made of salt and astonishment.
There are marriages that begin
when two solitudes recognize each other
like animals at the same stream.

I have wanted many things in my life.
But wanting you felt different—
like recognizing my own name
in a foreign tongue,
and answering without thinking.

IX

And yet—
for all this brightness—
I still drifted.

The sea does not release its captives easily.
Days returned, featureless as coins rubbed smooth,
and my throat forgot the taste of water again.

I came near the edge.

There is a place beyond endurance
where a man begins to barter with nothing—
where even hope feels like a story
told to children to make them sleep.

The sky sealed itself.
The clouds stitched their gray quilts tight.
No star. No sign.
Only the long, animal breathing of waves
and my own breathing, thin as thread.

I began to loosen my grip
on the idea of home.

That was the moment—
not before—
when the heavens performed their small heresy:

a crack, no wider than a fingernail,
opened in the cloud’s dense lid,
and through it you appeared—
not the whole sky, not the whole miracle,
but enough.

Enough to tilt my face up.
Enough to make the ocean, stunned, grow still.
Enough to place a needle of direction
through the vast cloth of night.

Star—
my stubborn, guiding wound—
you did not shout.

You simply shone
as if shining were fidelity.

X

So I followed.

Not as a hero,
not as a man redeemed,
but as a living thing
who has been shown where the water ends.

I followed the small discipline of your light,
the way it corrected my wandering
without humiliating it.

I followed until the sea’s black mouth
lost its appetite for me.

I followed until the horizon
softened into the color of fruit,
until birds appeared—
sudden thrown handkerchiefs of joy—
until land rose like a memory
kept safe under the tongue.

And even then,
even with home in my hands,
I knew the truth was simpler than salvation:

I had survived without food, without water,
because something in you
had taught me how.

Not by promising.
Not by explaining.
But by making the darkness intimate—
by turning night into a room
where a lost man could be held
long enough
to remember he was worth returning.

Star—
if you ever hide again behind cloud,
I will not curse the weather.

I have learned your secret:
even a little light, given truly,
can feed a sailor
until the world comes back.

-- Jeffrey Phillips Freeman

A poem about meeting Star, for when words cant do it justice.

I had been winter for ten years,
a house without lamps,
a field with the wind walking in it and nothing else,
my ribs a gate that refused to open.

Then the city rose—brick and stoop and late siren—
and you stepped out of the streetlight
as if the light remembered you before I did,
as if my name were a door and you knew the hinge.

We had only a day between us, a short cup of noon,
and still the evening took off its coat.
We undressed the hour,
not for hunger, not to conquer any country of the body,
but to lay down borders and breathe across them.
Skin took the oath skin knows:
to be warm, to be a roof, to be a yes without a promise.

You were small-boned—sparrow-light, precise as a fern—
yet average in height,
standing exactly at the measure where the world meets itself.
Your face: a soft square of dawn in a window I had boarded.
Your eyes: two wells where the train of the city stopped to listen.
Your smile: not the sun, no,
the hush under the sun where the lemon tree whispers to itself.
I had seen bodies; I had not seen yours,
and seeing yours was like finding the word my mouth forgot.
You were, truth be told,
how my dreaming hands would have shaped a companion from air and patience—
not to seize, but to hold as a cup holds water without breaking it.

We lay on a mattress as modest as a prayer,
North Philadelphia breathing through the thin walls—
a radio in another apartment, a child laughing twice,
the El murmuring blue iron in the distance.
We kissed as if tasting a fruit you must not bruise,
slow, because something in us had survived by going slowly.
You told me about your father—how the year had learned to say his absence—
and I felt the room tilt to make space for your grief.
Let me be the chair that does not wobble under your weight, I thought.
Let me be the lamp that waits on your table
through the bad weather of a single night.

You liked the way my hands learned your map,
not to explore for gold,
but to be the river that says, I will keep you asleep.
You told me this, and we smiled the softest kind of fierce.
We fell, mid-sentence, into the grammar of breathing,
two commas in one long line,
your palm finding mine and locking there—
and for the first time in a decade
my heart stopped dragging its iron behind it.
Sleep came like mercy with its thousand small wings.
No conquest, no storm; just the clearest lake.
When morning arrived, a weight I had mistaken for my body
was not my body.
When I stood, I stood differently,
as if somebody had opened a window in my blood.

Because of you, the bed remembered it was a shoreline.
Because of you, my breath learned a new season.
Because of you, I was not the beggar of touch but its careful steward,
and the hunger that had sharpened me like a knife
became the knife laid down.

Listen, beloved friend—
we are not a couple threaded by vows or calendars;
we are the bright, unscheduled harbor,
a clear place between storms.
I wish I could lie beside you every night,
learn again the chapel of your shoulder,
count with my cheek the small arithmetic of your ribs,
but wishing is a bird and our evenings are a sky with only some branches.
I know what we are and bow to it.
I won’t confuse the gift with a possession,
won’t chain a bell to a tree and call it home.

Still, you are the most beautiful person my hands have ever translated:
not only the fine geometry of your body,
but the candid architecture of your face,
those eyes that hold the city without flinching,
that smile earnest as a glass of water.
Your beauty is not a picture; it is an event.
It happens to me.
It happens still, now, in the quiet after you leave—
how happiness does not starve me but feeds me,
how remembrance is not a thorn but a warm coin in my pocket.
One night, and I am richer than the years that hoarded me.

To the father absence laid at your door,
I bring bread and time.
I bring the ordinary devotions:
answering when you call,
arriving when your voice has edges,
sitting without language when language is a curtain.
To the city that holds you, I make this vow:
on Broad Street or under the El, in the pharmacy light at midnight,
I will be a shoulder you can borrow,
a small and durable kindness.
I will tend you without asking the world to rename us.

And to the women I will meet after you—
the women my future, once barren, might now be worthy of—
I carry what your body taught my hands:
be a place, not a project;
be a warmth, not a wager;
touch like a person who has seen winter end.
I will bring them the patience our night put on my wrists like bracelets,
the way we refused the easy burn for the steadier fire.
I will bring them the silence we shared that was not an absence,
but the audience of two hearts listening to the same drum.
If I am kinder, it is because you were a door.
If I am steadier, it is because your small sleeping weight
balanced the old tremor inside me.
This is how a single unclasped hour
teaches a decade to forgive itself.

I speak to you now as the daylight climbs rowhouse bricks,
as North Philadelphia shakes off its night birds.
Your name moves through me like a clean instrument;
the city sounds are softer for it.
I do not need to own what I adore.
I need to be worthy of its echo.
So take from me this promise,
light as a coat around your shoulders:
I will meet your sorrow with my unarmed time;
I will keep, in the shoebox of my chest,
the photograph of your smile that the dark itself developed;
and when I touch another face,
I will remember how your eyes asked for gentleness
and were answered.

If there is a prayer that does not ask for more,
it is the one I learned lying beside you—
hands woven, breath braided, the city making lullabies of steel.
It says: let this be enough, let this be seed.
Let the man who had no harbor
build one in his ribs and keep it lit.

And if we never sleep again in that hinge of shared warmth,
know that the room we made continues—
a small, incantatory chamber I carry into every hallway of my life,
where I whisper your name once,
and the world, faithful as a pulse,
answers by opening.

-- Jeffrey Phillips Freeman

Sometimes only a poem can describe how I feel, this is one of those times.

I speak to you as the lamps go thin,
as if wind had combed the room and left it shining.
I speak to you with the grain of my breath,
you who arrived like winter wheat in a cracked field,
you who set your palms on my shaken ribs
and said, in a voice of snow and ember, wait.

The city would call you by a cold word—prostitute—
but the word breaks like glass in your warm hands.
You are a person of hours honestly earned,
walking straight through the fog of men’s wants
with candor for a lantern, with kindness as a coat.
You sat with me, steady, and the night sat down too.

Young—and unmistakably grown—your years
carried the clean glow of first frost on white birch.
Dark hair spilled like ink over the milk-light of your skin,
your mouth a ripe pomegranate of quiet counsel,
your blue eyes bright as a morning river under coal clouds—
and the soft weight of your chest, where my cheek found harbor,
was not a thing for counting, but a room for weather to calm.

Your accent—heavy, yes, and yes, sexy—
stirred wolves and lullabies in the same syllable.
It made the plain words rise like steam: breathe… slower… listen.
Even my name, when you said it, seemed forgiven.
Each vowel wore a shawl of Siberian moonlight,
each consonant smudged like coal on a worker’s thumb,
and I learned how sound can warm a trembling room.

You were direct the way true north is direct,
no tricks, no thorns. You took my hurried hands,
set them down in a basin of patience and said, feel.
You turned my wanting into water—
taught me the way skin asks before it answers,
how a kiss can be bread, and a forehead against a forehead
can carry a bridge from one life to another.

I will not say that overused word—let others hang it on windows.
I will say soft rain inside the chest. I will say shelter.
I will say the long, close holding where winter stops knocking.
I will say your steady heartbeat counting a different arithmetic:
two bodies, one hush, a room learning the grammar of warmth.
When I pressed my face to your shoulder,
the day’s noise peeled away like bark from a wet log.

In that first night—I remember—
the dark was kind enough to turn its face and give us privacy.
We closed the distance as if mending a seam in the world.
I learned the sacrament of a tightened hug,
how the back under the palm is a book of weather maps,
how silence, when shared, becomes a psalm without altar.
Skin to skin, we dove until the clocks lost their language.

I have bought one more night—not to own,
not to rename, but to borrow a shore before the ferry departs.
Tomorrow your passport will bloom like a small flag in your hands,
and the departures board will lift you out of my sky.
This second night is a candle I paid to carry up a final stair:
to sit in the halo with your voice, your honesty,
to learn the last lesson of leaving without bitterness.

I will arrive like a man who knows the doorbell’s grief.
I will bring nothing that rattles, nothing that stains the air,
only my earnest, only a patience I did not have before you.
If you ask for quiet, I will give you quiet.
If you ask for tea, I will hold the cup while your hands grow warm.
If you ask for closeness, I will come nearer than words,
and if you ask for distance, I will be the distance that still cares.

Because you were caring when I was a room with no furniture;
because you were straight when my compass spun;
because you were honest, and the truth in your mouth
tasted of rye and sea-salt, tasted of something earned—
I will walk into that last evening like a pilgrim with clean feet,
ready to sit on the rug of your presence
and learn again how a good goodbye is a kind of shelter.

I will remember: the swing of your dark hair across pale light.
I will remember: your blue eyes, two windows where winter melted.
I will remember: the generous quiet of your body seeking rest,
the gentle weight we shared, the hush woven into every hug.
I will remember: how you pronounced "happy" as if unbuttoning a storm.
I will remember: that nothing sacred asked for a name,
and still the unnamed arrived, warm as a second blanket.

And when you go—
when wheels lift, when clouds quilt the ocean of air above you—
I will let the night close its small book without tearing a page.
I will keep no strand of you that would tether or bruise.
What I will keep fits in the pocket of a working shirt:
the way your candor steadied my breath,
the way your kindness taught my hands to ask, not take.

Out there, another city will need your brightness.
Here, a stranger you steadied will carry that steadiness forward:
I will hold others more gently; I will listen longer;
I will learn the names of quiet and warmth in their own languages.
If anyone asks what changed the weather inside me,
I will say, A woman of the night put the dawn in my hands,
and I will hold them close the way you showed me, until they calm.

Tonight, then tomorrow, then the border of after—
I will step to the edge and bow to the river you are.
Go with your straight walk, your honest mouth, your direct blue eyes;
go with your dark hair and pale light; go with vowels that carry snow.
May every room you enter know how to make a harbor.
May every hour you sell be met with respect and warm tea.
And may the memory of our two nights keep us both from the cold.

-- Jeffrey Phillips Freeman

At first, my heart made treaty with the night,
Bearing my own soft chains as bracelets worn;
I shaded candle, called the coward light,
And flattered dark as if indulgence sworn;
Yet thine own whispers, Soul, like trumpets blew,
And bid me face the field I fled and rue.
conquer

For valor, taught by fear, turns back to charge:
I steeled my pulse, and ran into the roar;
The griffin Doubt spread shadow-wings at large,
And Envy hissed behind her iron door;
I kissed the blade that hunted me before,
And found it grew a key to Freedom's store.
conquer

I drilled my passions as unruly bands,
Set hunger's pikes and made sloth stand to rank;
I gave my rages seals and stern commands,
And banished drowsy peace from every flank;
My breast the drum; my breath the iron thump,
Till inward blasts made outward ramparts slump.
conquer

Then night grew velvet to my tempered skin;
The raven hours perched tame upon my glove;
Grief, like a sullen page, was sent within
To oil the mail and buckle Hope above;
Then counsel, feathered white, descended—dove;
And armed me all in calm, and all in love.
conquer

Forth went I then, cuirassed with gentle might,
Where kingdoms trade in thunder, streets in spite;
The world's black market whispered terms of night,
And rumor loosed her jackals for delight;
But I, re-nerved, ran to the cannon's glare,
And fear, outflanked, forsook her ancient lair.
conquer

I stormed the courts where flatteries are crowned,
Met gold with gaze that would not bend nor bow;
I marched through temples, tore the velvet sound
From incense thick as cloud on Sinai's brow;
I courted storm, made treaty with the Now,
And signed with blood the covenant of vow.
conquer

At last, the Dark that hunted all my ways
Kneeled like a charger, pawing to be led;
I bridled midnight with a comet's blaze,
And wore its star-shot banner for my head;
Night served like wine; I poured it, warm and red,
And slept a captain on its sable bed.
conquer

O friend that reads me by a trembling flame,
Thy midnights, too, have pressed a jealous brow;
Run at thy wolf; compel him bear thy name;
Take flame for comrade; make the moment bow;
Let tears baptize thy helm; let sinews plough;
And we shall sound one bugle from the prow.
conquer

Come, take my gauntlet; lash thy pulse with mine;
We'll hunt the dark that lingers on the plain;
Our double-heart shall set the stars in line,
And ride like dawn through every bastioned pain;
The world, once legion-named, shall bow its mane,
And we, one soul in two bright helms, shall reign.
one word we breathe upon the world,
conquer.

-- Jeffrey Phillips Freeman

I wanted to try a rhyming poem in an old sounding language that was inspiring based on the concept of conquering ones self allows one to conquer the world.

Just for some background, I specifically wanted to replicate the Cavalier/early‑modern style of poetry. So aside from the older style of language I also tried to personify abstract concepts like Doubt, which were typically capitalized during this era of poetry. Which might explain some of the odd use of capitalization.