When A Drop Falls From The Gray Sky Poem by Joseph D E Phillips

it does not look like what we imagine.
Often it resembles the shape of a red blood cell
though clear, colorless and reflective as glass.

An inward dip on the bottom side of it,
our cell is not darting downward
like a hawk about to catch its prey.

It is, instead, careening this way, then that,
catching the wind to slow its fall.

When that drop fell from the gray sky
onto your eager tongue, just now
you were not drinking something new.

You were drinking part of a drop
that quenched the thirst of a
carpenter ant in Australia
just a few months ago,

the same drop that arrived on earth
as a small part of a great comet
a few billion years ago,

ending twenty-thousand light-years of travel
from the corpse of a star.

You stuck out your tongue
and tasted the gift of a dead sun.

Every cell in your body
is the product of the stars.