All my life, I was taught to follow the leader, as they coerced my thoughts, scrubbed my mind, confined my thinking, grabbed my attention and molded my every idea, like locking a bird into a cage.

Poetry came to the rescue as it released those birds from the cage; every bird flew into the sky, chose its own paths, encountered its own winds, witnessed its own colors…

As a child at night lying in bed, I saw the stars twinkling back at me, scintillating, sparking something in my young mind. They explained this magic as just physics: stars burst, light traveled, years, decades, even centuries later it reaches you and me.

It seems like I had never felt any magic until one day, when I recalled a line from a dead poet. I sensed his words lit up the night sky for me. It came and left, nothing to do with how far they had to travel. As imagination soars with those birds into the clouds, from that moment on, I started to compile the flashing glimmers, one by one, one cluster at a time.

Through so many years I counted, there were 105 poets of the past I have compiled in “A Few Words About Stars,” in the last two chapters of this book.

I know, there are many more birds and stars.

But, I chose to stop counting and am sorry to have missed those I did not include in this tally. I pray and believe there will always be more eyes to view the stars above with wonder, and more poets to light up the night sky in the foreseeable and unforeseeable future.
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