Five-second life cycle.

DSCN0807.JPG, originally uploaded by olivander.

The rockets hiss into the night sky on writhing smoke tails and explode into fountains of flaming colors. The sun-hot embers burn gold, red, green, blue, and white, meld for an eyeblink with the starscape, then burn out and fall back to Earth as lumps of black cinders.

Black cinders in the black night.

No one sees them land.