The Story Behind Stardust

For eleven years, I wrote things down before I knew what they were becoming.

A line after a long day.

A poem after a loss.

A few words in the middle of my ordinary life, when something small suddenly felt too important to forget.

I write about people.

Not in a distant way. Not as characters. More as moments I could not stop noticing.

The way someone holds a cup when they are trying not to cry.

The way a feeling enters a room before anyone names it.

The way an emotion is often quieter than we expect.

The way a person can keep going with a whole private world inside them.

For a long time, these poems stayed with me.

They lived in files, notebooks, drafts, and unfinished places. I did not think of them as books at first. They were simply the way I paid attention. The way I made sense of love, loss, courage, family, loneliness, healing, and the strange beauty of being alive.

Then my teen son began organising them.

That changed everything.

What had felt scattered started to take shape. Poems that had lived quietly for years began to stand beside one another. I started to see that they belonged together, not because they were all about the same subject, but because they were all looking at life in the same way.

Closely.

Tenderly.

With a belief that ordinary moments are never only ordinary.

That is where Stardust began.

Not in the sky.

At the kitchen table.

In ordinary moments.

Reflective.

Intimate.

In the dust above a cold cup of tea.

In the chair by the window.

In the scar on the table.

In the garden gate that still carries someone’s absence.

In the blue umbrella returned years too late.

In all the small things that happen in our lives and mean something even after we think the moment has passed.

Want to read twelve selected poems from Stardust?

The poetry collection Stardust is now on Amazon.