TO THE RED STAR

TO THE RED STAR

Once I gazed into the darkened vastness,
Seeing you, flame-reddish star,
A blazing point, out-streaming strength,
And radiating gleaming light,
And gleaming radiating might.

You’re just a smaller arid world to us,
With pinkish sky and rust-red rock and dust;
But once you were seen as the sacred source
Of war and strength and striving force.
You claimed the blaze of active red, bright hue,
And iron your metal: tough, flame-tempered, true.
It flows in our red veins, forever ferrying
Life’s strength of oxygen to brain and limb.

Oh Aries, wargod, in this sad but clever age
We’ve shattered myth’s great mirror, yet fatal rage
Has blindly shaped such power as you portrayed.

For steel and iron, moulded to a million objects, made
Man’s making substance, with swift bullet, stabbing blade,
And blazing shell and blasting cannon’s flame,
Have torn this human age with grief and pain.

Yet you could still be thought of as
A helping paradigm, in this:
That strength is of the structure of creation,
Supporting all in All in wise relation.

For measure of your stellar wanderings first brought
The vision of the ways of worlds to Kepler’s thought:
The pulse of living ellipses that run
In harmony about a single sun-
No dead perfection of unaltered pace,
In static circles of unchanging space,
That ancient intellects had wished to trace;
But rather gaining stable power by
Dynamic sweeps of motion through the sky;
No rigid, epicycled, clockwork show,
But splendid, balanced, rhythmic flow.

Once I gazed into the darkened vastness,
Seeing you, flame-reddish star,
A blazing point, out-streaming strength:
And radiating gleaming light,
And gleaming radiating might.