THE WISEWOMAN TELLS A STORY ABOUT COMMERCE BEFORE RENOUNCING WORLDLY POSSESSIONS:
Image licensed via Adobe Stock, edited.
A rich man wanted to be richer, so he sold stars. How to sell a star? What people desperately want, they choose to believe they can buy. They participate in the lie alongside the seller. So this rich man rode his camel from village to village, selling rolled up strips of blanched animal skin. On the strips, he had drawn a black dot to represent a star. A person—someone far poorer than the rich man—would give him a couple coins, and he would give them this animal skin. This is how commerce works.
“But which star is mine?” people asked, afraid their neighbor might have purchased the same one. The rich man would wait until dark (for his customers often made him dinner) and he would gather with a cluster of people and peer at each animal skin as if studying the drawing. He would squint at the sky and point to one star out of hundreds and say, “That one! That’s your star.” It was difficult to distinguish which he pointed to, but what did it matter?
For nights, each villager tossed a finger at the sky to brag about the beauty to which they alone had access. Others purchased more stars, until the whole village had given coins to the rich man, who packed up his skin-scrolls and left. When the villagers called “Goodbye,” it sounded like Thank you forever. In time, the villagers realized the important part of the transaction was the animal skin proving their—their—ownership. After dinner, they would sit on the floor and unroll the skin to stare at until bedtime when they rolled it back up, tied it shut, and hid it where no thief would guess. For years, they spent the whole night indoors, staring at black dots on white skins, which, if one thinks about it, are the opposite of stars.
Brad Aaron Modlin’s internationally viral poetry has been experienced nearly two million times. His record-selling book Everyone at This Party Has Two Names is available from Black Lawrence Press. His poetry also appears in orchestral scores, art galleries, and with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. His prose appears with Brevity, The Cupboard Pamphlet, Denver Quarterly, and the Pushcart Anthology 2025. An associate professor and the Reynolds Endowed Chair of Creative Writing, he teaches (under)grads at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He often writes about hope or embarrassment because he believes in humans’ goodness and is very clumsy at the gym.