Skywards

It is a revelation: Even the banal becomes momentous

when you look at it with proper attention.

Just point your phone skywards

and discover constellations.

A warren of circuits and microprocessors

makes it easy to mimic the early Babylonians,

drawing lines and connections until animals and gods appear.

The mystery of the night sky

connects all who have stood beneath it,

curiosity unchanged over centuries.

Imagine the possibilities. To know when to plant crops.

When to marry. It is a comfort.

Astrology and astronomy have always been entwined,

developed together out of the universal desire

to define and explain, to study patterns

and to discredit coincidence,

a bit of craziness when the white light of night

casts shadows, a surprise through the kitchen window at 3 am,

or the appearance of Sagittarius evaporating an argument

when the planets line up like a string of pearls.

Pointing my phone to the heavens, 

I can name every star, satellite and telescope,

identify Orion’s sparkling belt, the lion and beautiful Virgo,

imprinting the darkness and making imagination real.

Science enhancing what has come before.

One can almost feel the awe of those desert people,

nothing between them and the blackness

pricked with flickering radiance.

Standing in the open on a moonless night,

staring until they were full of communal fever,

argument and consensus necessary

to plot the pathways. And does not that

look like a nine-headed snake?

And so it does. Until decisions

take on what seems like divine intervention.

Five thousand years in their wake,

the answers are in the stars.

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Larry Kilman is an American poet and journalist from New York who has spent more time outside of the US than within, living in Paris, Hong Kong, Munich, Frankfurt and currently in Johannesburg, none of it planned. He is therefore a believer in the power of serendipity and being open to the unexpected. His poetry has been influenced by this experience.