September 13, 2026

You Too Are Written

I am a man: little do I last and the night is enormous. But I look up: the stars write. Unknowing I understand: I too am written, and at this very moment someone spells me out.

Paz wrote this short poem, titled Brotherhood, as a tribute to the ancient astronomer Ptolemy, and included it in his 1987 collection A Tree Within, gathered soon after into his Collected Poems. He was in his seventies by then, a man who had spent decades writing about solitude and the fragile place of a single life inside history. Facing an old age still without certainty about legacy or meaning, he chose to look up rather than look away from the enormous night. The courage in these lines is quiet: the refusal to shrink from one's own brief, small life, and the insistence on reading oneself as part of something larger.