Sing now of the star that ate its young,
the one that shone among the ordinary and gave nothing away—
no tremor in its light, no stutter in its turning,
only the silent work of appetite, the vast belly
and the throat too narrow to swallow what it took.
The astronomers found it by its crime:
a bloom of lithium in the spectrum, faint as rumour,
the chemical fingerprint of a world consumed—
rock broken into light, iron into ash,
the child pulled back into the furnace of its making.
The star did not confess. It burned as stars do,
indistinguishable from the blameless,
and the heavens, which have seen this before,
did not intervene. The gods, if there are gods,
were occupied elsewhere.
Listen: there is a realm in the wheel of rebirth
where the hungry ghosts dwell—preta, they are called,
creatures with bellies vast as drought and throats like needles,
who eat and eat and are never filled.
The star is such a ghost. It swallowed stone and silicate,
the architecture of a planet still unborn,
and the meal changed nothing. The hunger remains.
In the womb of the sand tiger shark, the largest sibling
eats the others before they know what breath is,
devours them in the dark of their shared beginning
so that only one will see the sea.
The star is such a shark. It consumed its own
not from malice but from the logic of survival,
the pitiless arithmetic of what must burn
to keep the burning going.
And so it shines. And so we chart it.
We mark its distance, catalogue its type,
record the bloom of lithium like a stain on silk,
and know it for what it is:
a devourer wearing the face of the ordinary,
a crime the size of a solar system,
visible only in the bloodwork.
The star does not weep. The shark does not apologise.
The hungry ghost does not stop being hungry.
And the universe, which is neither kind nor cruel,
goes on recording the evidence
in spectra, in silence, in the light
that reaches us long after the world is gone.