Del Cascar reads like a cosmic nursery rhyme. A huge, almost godlike figure stands on a flaming star, his dangling feet reaching all the way to China, where his toes turn brown. He stretches his fingers over the sea like sails from Dover, catches a Mandarin at prayer, and tickles Orion’s hair. The scale is dreamlike and playful, as though the whole world and sky are small enough to touch at once.
The mood shifts at the end. As the sun sinks through crimson bars, his blind face is left marked with stars, and those same distant toes in China keep hot the tears he weeps. What begins as mischief and wonder turns quietly sad. The poem suggests loneliness or the ache of being stretched across enormous distances—immense, yet still vulnerable and weeping.