What if you looked up
And there were no consoling
Sky but a big tear
A whirring black hole
An unexpected tubular visitor
From a distant constellation
And the starry night
Impossible to decipher
No open book of Revelation
No chart for Andromeda
Ursa Maior, today’s North Star
Vega, the one slated for after
Our End of Times
All undetectable up there
Through no fault of their own
Nor is our eyesight to blame
Simply you cannot discern a design
Can’t interpret the texture of cluster
A mythological layout to the story
Not that of the Hero
Nor that of the Villain
Can’t even pin it
On the fog or the wind
For obstructing or eliding
Maybe a defective heart or imagination
A hostile takeover of the bioma in our gut
Something perhaps endemic to our species
A glitch in the barcode
Clumping together our fairy stardust
Turning it into a muddled story
Into unstable dissonance
Long unacknowledged
Long misheard and misread
Plots for sycophants and hierophants
As the compass cannot be divined
Pina Piccolo, 10 October, 2023