Brackets are what we use for quiet things: an aside, a stage direction, a thought we would rather not announce. So it is a striking choice for Reuben to put a scream inside them. The title is "(Scream)", and the five lines that follow are wrapped in a single pair of parentheses. Before we read a word, the poem has set up a clash between how loud its subject is and how contained its form is.
What happens is simple. The speaker reports that the stars are screaming his or her name. Screaming normally signals panic, but the next line removes the alarm: "Not urgently, they can't help it." The stars come across like people with enormous voices who don't know their own volume, more clumsy than menacing. The central idea seems to be what it feels like to be singled out by something vast. The poem never says whether this is destiny, ambition, expectation or plain wonder, and the stars' calling can carry any of those. What it does show is a response: the speaker doesn't flinch and simply laughs.
The language is plain, and that makes the cosmic scale easier to feel. "Big and fiery" is nearly childlike, yet "fiery" is literally true of stars and also suggests temper and passion. The most memorable phrase is the paradox "smallest whispers are deafening." A whisper that deafens is a contradiction, and it tells us there is no quiet setting on these voices. The repeated "Their" at the start of lines three and four stacks the stars' qualities one on top of the other, the way noise builds in a crowded room. The whole conceit also reverses something we know: stars reach us as distant, silent light, and the poem makes them the loudest things imaginable.
The poem has no rhyme and follows no fixed metre, which suits a speaker who is overwhelmed but unbothered. The lines swell and then drop. Counting roughly, they run seven, eight, nine, nine and six syllables, so the two long middle lines pile on volume and the short last line comes as a release. Line three also runs straight into line four without the word "that" ("so big and fiery / Their smallest whispers…"), so the sentence tumbles forward instead of stopping politely. Sound does quiet work too. The hissing s of "stars," "screaming," "smallest" and "whispers" makes the poem sound like a whisper even while it describes a scream. The dash after "help it" works as a small shrug before the explanation.
The final line is the most open. "I laugh above the noise" can mean the laugh rises over the din, louder or lighter than it. It can also mean the speaker is literally above it, looking down from a height. Laughter itself is ambiguous. It could be delight, defiance or nervous release. Judging by the easy tone of "Not urgently," delight seems closest, but the poem lets us hear the others underneath. The closing bracket arrives right after "noise," as though the whole roar has been tucked away, and the speaker has the last word.
The poem is significant because it does so much in so little space. It turns the usual scale upside down, so that the universe is the loud one and a single person is the one being called. It also offers a small, memorable way of coping with being overwhelmed, which is to stay within the noise and laugh at it. Putting the scream in brackets means the poem's volume is held in check by its form, much as the speaker holds steady among the stars. Readers can take that as confidence, as protection, or as a private joke with the cosmos. The poem is short, but it leaves a lot of room to decide.