the cold star-bane
   Has cloven and rent their hearts in twain...
      --Yeats, "Song of the Happy Shepherd"

Invertebrate phosphorescence
Shines fiercer than your languid light,
So jinking creatures in the moor
Presume more pride than yours by right.

Hypermortal microbes drunk on
Photons purge them through the dark,
Yet scorn to field your wizened squibs
These ages after they embark.

The heavy earths that choke your core
Like old, sclerotic arteries
Mock worlds you used to stoke to life
In all its teeming congeries.

"Disdain!  Ah no!  I pity thee."
Said proud Prometheus under chain
To He who strove to nihilate
Prometheus in vulgar pain.

We honor idle Japetus
(of no distinction save his sons)
To wink about the clear night sky
That drowns you in your own aeons.

And so you bear this circus name
Although you spread like Asia,
And all your ancient mysteries
Are claimed for one Egeria.

And though the pulsar metronome
Usurps the fealty of your spawn
As do retreating quasar gods
And top quarks in the Tevatron,

We still turn to your wormwood law
When hatred bites our reasoning lips
Forgetting your amaranth half
In our better relationships.

Your ministry is smothered in
Lip service to some hothead star
While flight of species from our world
Should serve as ample avatar.

And woe! the day your crimson brow
Should burst back into candent heat,
When, wrapped in nuclear winter, Earth
Joins the burnt planets at your feet.

--Uche
2 April 1996, Irving