NATURE Poem: “Stargazing with You”, by Kelton Jones

The night feels quiet now,
only the slight hum of distant traffic and the soft scrape of wind through trees.
But I am not alone.

Somewhere, far away,
Her voice rises in the dark,
calling me home through the stars.
My siblings and cousins are out there too,
looking at the same sky I am looking at and picking apart the constellations like we always did,
Together.

They don’t speak of it much now—
the heavy weight of the distance between us, between who we were,
but I see it when we talk,
like a

gap

in the conversation that no one can fill.

Maybe that’s why I keep looking up.
Maybe that’s why the sky feels like it has always been ours,
even when we are scattered, even when the world told us
to forget our names
and the stories our families had carried.

But the stars—
they don’t forget.
They hold us all,
even when we feel lost in the dark,
even when the space between us
feels too wide to bridge.

I close my eyes for a moment,
and there you are—
your voice reaching to me
across the distance,
your laughter carrying
on the wind like it always did.
And maybe, just maybe, the stars are the threads

we never knew could tie us—

still burning,
still waiting,
to pull us back together, no matter how far apart we are.