©2018 by Jack A. Urquhart

I don’t know much about red dwarfs,
no expert of celestial bodies here;
not an astronomer, not even an astrologer
casting about for friendly signs and symbols,
a star-lit chart to some heavenly happiness.
I only know that there are a lot of them,
and that red dwarfs are unfathomably slow,
interminably ancient, depleting their resources,
nevertheless, after a universally self-destructive pattern.

Also (not surprisingly), they lack luster.

Like most beings accelerating in space,
red dwarfs never achieve full-fledged stardom;
rather, they collapse slowly on themselves
becoming smaller and immaterial over time
(as well as exponentially more dense).
All the intimacies that fuel a friendly fusion,
are consumed in a dimly read conflagration,
until there is only a gravity-bound center—
no more at the heart of the matter than stillness,
a desolate mass in an expanse of space.
Just another black hole in the billions of us,
invisible to the naked human eye.