Somebody is missing, and the night sky has taken on the job of saying so. In "voice o stars," the speaker is surrounded by whispering stars that murmur "in my sleep and as i / write this to you." The poem is a letter, and it knows it. It addresses "you" directly, even anticipating the reader's question ("what do they whisper / of") before answering it. The answer is a neat paradox: the whispers are "everything, but / nothing, if its not you." The stars talk endlessly, but about one subject only, the absent beloved.
That single subject is hammered home by the refrain "na pak as i eat. / na pak as i sleep. / na pak as i bathe." The poem never explains these words. Since the stars "repeat your name," the likeliest reading is that "na pak" is the name, or the sound of it, though that is an inference from the text. What matters is the pattern. Eating, sleeping and bathing are the most ordinary acts of a day, and the whisper follows the speaker into every one. The third repetition then breaks outward: "as i bathe / in the light of the moon." Moonlight becomes bathwater, and the domestic slides into the cosmic.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular beat. It is built from short lines of three to five words, grouped in seven quatrains and then a closing couplet. Lines keep breaking mid-phrase: "like a / song of harp and fiddle," "the / stars," "i cant see // you." That last break is the cleverest. The word "you" is pushed across the stanza gap, so the beloved is literally out of sight, beyond the edge of the previous stanza. The lowercase and the missing apostrophes ("cant," "its") give the voice the feel of a note written quickly and privately, with no time for polish.
The sound imagery is gentle but strange. The whispers are compared to "harp and fiddle," an unusual pairing, one instrument delicate and the other earthy. They are "urgent although calm," an oxymoron that fits longing well, since it is patient on the surface and insistent underneath. The speaker's reply is a question, "can you hear me?" The next one, "do they voice on your / behalf?", turns "voice" into a verb. The stars may be carrying words from the lover as well as about them. The title's "voice o stars" might be read the same way. The "o" could be a shortened "of," or an old-fashioned "O" of address, and both readings fit.
The poem's real turn comes with daylight. The stars belong to the hours "dusk to dawn," and when the speaker complains that "the sun is blinding, / burning, blistering, / blocking," the sound changes. Four b-words land like blows, and the last, "blocking," stands alone on a line, cut short. The sun's brightness is a kind of silence. It hides the stars, so it also hides the speaker's only go-between with the beloved. Light usually means comfort and clarity, but here it is the enemy, and the dark is where connection happens.
The ending is deliberately small. After seven four-line stanzas the poem gives only two lines: "when will you return / dear?" The word "dear" hangs by itself, the polite sign-off of a letter that has turned into a plea. "Return" tells us the beloved has gone, but the poem never says where, why or for how long, and it never answers. The form simply runs out of room, as the speaker might.
What makes the poem worth reading is that restraint. It has one conceit, stars as whispering messengers, and it follows it through sleep, meals, moonlight and sunrise without explaining or decorating. The speaker never says "I miss you" outright. The longing shows in the whispers that never stop and in the sun that is too bright to bear.