Richard Fireman believes a good poem should reflect both individual and universal perspectives, and strives to do so in his work, expressing his thoughts and feelings about both the microcosm of his life's experiences and the macrocosm of the universe at large. Each of his poems are constellations in the sky of his life, presented to the reader for interpretation and meaning. Here is the world as I see it, he says; this is how it seems to me. We are all in the same world, looking up at the stars, and this is my viewpoint, one man in the vast unknowable universe.
Constellations are our attempt to make sense of the universe.
We create patterns in the sky, trying to understand what God might mean,
and write our stories as if we knew.
These poems are my constellations. The words are stars.
May their light be a guide to find your way home.
Scape
Ancestors called them constellations,
populated the heavens with stories,
made the giant wheel turn
to human rhythms, pushed
the wheel turning night
to day turning life
to tales of gods and men and women turning
into gods, conquering monsters as we conquer
the turning of time, guiding
the wheel with imagination's surging push,
through any black hole yet unthought-of,
past any edge at the end of any world.
New Worlds Need Names
This time it was all going well
but as we watched the TV
she said it's going too well,
something's going to happen.
At the end of the show I got ready to leave
and she asked me to take her home.
She was home. She didn't know
like she didn't know I came to see her each week
or what a galaxy was
or how to tear a tissue.
She couldn't understand how I knew she'd be there,
how I'd know what planet to point the ship at.
As I write this I hear on the news
we sent up a rocket to catch a piece of a comet.
On the way home on the radio is a story
of snow falling on the living and dead.
Outside the car freezing rain is falling.
Last week my mother said Pop is coming
but didn't know whose or the difference.
In the old days they were wise to make constellations
when they didn't know where they were heading,
to recognize what was too far away.
