Pleiades Meditation

Only on the darkest of winter nights
can one find the sky's daughters,
clustered like so many biddies

leaning together for just one

juicy morsel of useless gossip,

hidden between a hunter's legs.

At times it is as if You are

as cold and as distant as they,

beyond our scope of vision.

Despite the belying of the senses

which are more often than not

our betrayers,

You lie in wait with baited breath

as if You ever had any...

(Ah yes, at one time You stooped below

and filled lungs with the wail

that all creation takes

at existence's entrance.

Then You knew that fate

to which You had assigned us

that fights for every gulp of oxygen.)

...for Galileo's moment of discovery

as he myopically peers through lenses

made from broken glass.