Sidereal Elegy
A poem
kicker
Time is in the details. Someone had to tell Polaris
it would not always be
the polestar. Important standard candle
though it was, eventually, vast ages hence,
Earth’s fickle axis would fix
upon another. Someday Vega would replace it,
though we would not name names.
Meanwhile, revolutions. Meanwhile, Stalined
or Styxed. Nightly we prayed for inertial guidance.
We lay awake thinking time itself would cry
to see the century it compiled, but all its tears
and mechanisms were sealed. The “Mists of Time,”
stapled between scare quotes! Come to me,
they whispered, and even the stars obeyed.