I wrote this when I got annoyed by all the bloody satellites up in the sky muddying the constellations.
I don’t pretend to understand space and time –
But my night skies shifted from 1995.
New little lights blinking, red and green –
Rich men intruding into what once was mine.
Once was ours.
So far. Yet only small twists of your head apart.
Of Hercules labours and some old gods
Setting a mortal amongst the stars.
Orion hunting, chased by Scorpius.
Ariadne’s Crown, Draco, Cygnus.
And sometimes swirls of milk, rushing rivers.
Of beasts riding slowly away, unreachable.
Telling us when to harvest,
Leading us through deep dark waters.
Giving us stories to pass on.
And I looked too, at grandad’s finger pointing up:
“The big bear cares for the young one.”
A charcoal bull lowing in a painted cave in France
Replicates the same dance
Of zodiac signs in our newspapers and phones.
Stardust created the iron in my blood –
The calcium in my cat’s brittle bones.
And to appease you
We tore a man’s heart out
And turned the cavern into a hearth.
Slung arrows into a maiden when Mars rose.
Cried tears of amber when Phaeton got too close.
And those who could make sense of the light in the dark
Named things unseen with an artificial lens
And removed Earth from the centre of the verse.
“Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades?”
No. Our lifespans, comfortingly insignificant,
Stars remain homeric, luminary, oneiric.
When they stole the skies from us, no one said a word.
A rich man’s star cannon.
He says he’ll visit the melting North,
Productivity is godliness, and he recycles ten tons.
In gaining, we have lost, says the Open One.
And the morningstar laughs:
But you can pay your bills, the news can tear you apart,
We’re only adding to crystalline refineries, street lights, neon.
Or am I the wrong one?
Mourning for something that isn’t really mine –
That I spend more time staring at screens than skies?
I couldn’t tell you when the Nile was about to rise.
I can barely point out Venus or Sirius.
Especially when some blinking thing passes it by.
You’ve taken our land, our time, our minds,
Why must you take our sky?
– Dara Theodora
