Richard Magahiz
Groats in the Broth of Heaven
A silent pulse in Virgo begins to yield stars.
Mortals take care: your wayward tongues reveal stars.
As Eve licks the tip of her old pencil
she’s tasting the corpse flesh of real stars.
A hermetic parchment reveals forgotten tales
as around the heads of Sabaean scribes cartwheel stars.
That actress’s body is fully owned by Hollywood,
but her feet shimmer in ten-inch heel stars.
Her kitchen smells of fish, while on the linoleum
Cassie considers irregular lemon peel stars.
My three-year-old refuses all but primordial soup
so I fill his dish with slightly congealed stars.
This riverboat ploughs the Alexandrian mud,
its lantern casting lunes of sidewheel stars.
Drunk on verse, this scribbler misses steady work
stripping abandoned volumes to steal stars.
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Richard Magahiz tries to live an ordered life in harmony with all things natural and created but one that follows unexpected paths. He’s spent much of his time wrangling computers as a day job but now, when he’s not playing making music, he is writing speculative and mainstream poems. His work has appeared at Star*Line, Dreams and Nightmares, Sein und Werden, Uppagus, Bewildering Stories, and Shoreline of Infinity. His website is at https://zeroatthebone.us/
Author’s Notes and Backstory: I first came up with the idea of this ghazal on October 6, 2021, and while the radif is unchanged from that rough draft, every couplet has been altered modified to make the verse more personal in every way. I added two additional couplets including the traditional maqta in which the poet makes reference to themself. This sequence is the poem I believed in strongly enough to send out to editors more times than nearly any other I have written.
Editor’s Comments and Image Citations: From various sources on the www, the phrase “groats in the broth of heaven” likely refers to a concept from the Chinese web novel Reverend Insanity, where “groats” represent the “immortal essence” and “broth of heaven” refers to the “grotto heaven,” a pocket dimension that high-ranking Gu Immortals possess.
Reverend Insanity is a Chinese fantasy novel, also known as Gu Zhen Ren (Daoist Master of Gu), that follows Fang Yuan, a protagonist who pursues immortality through a pragmatic and self-serving approach to cultivation, using a complex system based on Gu worms.
Image credit, Microsoft Designer, with input: “a crystal bowl holding the universe of stars”