Various Ways of Gauging

Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem 

The stars and planets and the moon mislead

Us. Lunar influences tend to be worst,

Irrational at best.  The comets speed

And glitter, each a long-tailed ghostly burst

Past proper parts of constellation thought.

These tortured strung-out wraiths of coldness fail

To send us messages except those fraught

With ambiguity.  Their forked tails flail

Away, diaphanous with solar force

Impelling like the astrological

Imaginations of a mage, each course

An oval not quite cosmological.

  We left behind the Druids long ago.

    Instead most guess that Darwin sways, aglow.

~ Phillip Whidden