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| Why do so many depictions of Orion include his belt but not his sword?
Still, I like this one because it labels both Betelgeuse and Bellatrix |
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These two star maps are less vivid than the one above,
yet they are helpful in other ways.
Firstly, they both include the sword!
Secondly, they include Sirius, the brightest star in
Canis Major, one of Orion's hunting dogs.
Sound Cloud
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Orion has always been a favorite with the poets,
as these excerpts reveal:
#1
from "Orion"
by Charles Tennyson Turner (1808 - 1879)
In silence, when the busy day was done,
Shining with wondrous brilliancy aloft,
And flickering like a casement 'gainst the sun!
I've seen thee soar from out some snowy cloud,
Which held the frozen breath of land and sea,
Yet broke and sever'd as the wind grew loud
But earth-bound winds could not dismember thee,
Nor shake thy frame of jewels; I have guess'd
At thy strange shape and function, haply felt
The charm of that old myth about thy belt
And sword . . .
#2
from "Winter Stars"
by Sara Teasdale (1884 - 1933)
But when I lifted up my head
From shadows shaken on the snow,
I saw Orion in the east
Burn steadily as long ago . . .
#3
from "Baseball and Writing"
by Marianne Moore (1887 - 1972)
the Stadium is an adastrium.
O flashing Orion,
your stars are muscled like the lion.
#4
from "Orion"
by Adrienne Rich (1929 - 2012)
my cast-iron Viking, my helmed
lion-heart king in prison.
Years later now you're young
my fierce half-brother, staring
down from that simplified west
your breast open, your belt dragged down
by an oldfashioned thing, a sword
the last bravado you won't give over
though it weighs you down as you stride
and the stars in it are dim
and maybe have stopped burning.
But you burn, and I know it . . .
Pity is not your forte.
Calmly you ache up there
pinned aloft in your crow's nest,
my speechless pirate!
#5
the poem "Orion"
by James Longenbach (1959 – 2022)
Stars rising like something said, something never
To be forgotten, shining forever—look
How still they are.
Blind hunter crawling
Toward sunrise, then healed.
He opened his eyes to find her waiting
—Afraid—and together they traveled
Lightly: requiring nothing
But a sense that the road beneath them stretched
Forever. At the edge
He entered the water, swam so far
That he became a speck: his body
Washed ashore, then raised to where we see it now—
The belt, the worn-out sword. I'm not
Afraid—
Except that there is nothing beneath us,
No ground without fear. The body vulnerable
—You can look at me—
The body still now, never
Changing, rising forever—stay—
Like something said.
[e.g., Stoddart, O'Malley]
but perhaps the real question is:
do we even deserve the heroics of Orion,
the "faithful beauty of the stars,"
and the grandeur night sky:
The Earthlings
The Earthlings arrived unannounced, entered
without knocking, removed their shoes
and began clipping their toenails.
They let the clippings fall wherever.
They sighed loudly as if inconvenienced.
We were patient. We knew our guests
were in an unfamiliar environment; they needed
time to adjust. For dinner, we prepared
turkey meatloaf with a side of cauliflower.
This is too dry, they said.
This is not like what our mothers made.
We wanted to offer a tour of our world,
demonstrate how we freed ourselves
from the prisons of linear time.
But the Earthlings were already spelunking
our closets, prying tools
from their containers and holding them
to the light. What’s this? they demanded.
What’s this? What’s this? And what’s this?
That’s a Quantum Annihilator; put that down.
That’s a Particle Grinder; please put that down.
We could show you how to heal the sick, we said.
We could help you feed every nation, commune
with the all-seeing sentient energy that palpitates
through all known forms of matter.
Nah! they said. Teach us to vaporize a mountain!
Teach us to turn the moon into revenue!
Then the Earthlings
left a faucet running and flooded our basement.
by Matthew Olzmann
from Denver & the BBC
Thursday, November 28th
Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT ~ The Faithful Beauty of the Stars
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com
Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogsppot.com
Thanks to Claude R. for suggesting
ReplyDeletethis one by Robert Frost:
The Star-splitter
"You know Orion always comes up sideways.
Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains,
And rising on his hands, he looks in on me
Busy outdoors by lantern-light with something
I should have done by daylight, and indeed,
After the ground is frozen, I should have done
Before it froze, and a gust flings a handful
Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney
To make fun of my way of doing things,
Or else fun of Orion's having caught me.
Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights
These forces are obliged to pay respect to?"
So Brad McLaughlin mingled reckless talk
Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming,
Till having failed at hugger-mugger farming,
He burned his house down for the fire insurance
And spent the proceeds on a telescope
To satisfy a lifelong curiosity
About our place among the infinities.
"What do you want with one of those blame things?"
I asked him well beforehand. "Don't you get one!"
"Don't call it blamed; there isn't anything
More blameless in the sense of being less
A weapon in our human fight," he said.
"I'll have one if I sell my farm to buy it."
There where he moved the rocks to plow the ground
And plowed between the rocks he couldn't move,
Few farms changed hands; so rather than spend years
Trying to sell his farm and then not selling,
He burned his house down for the fire insurance
And bought the telescope with what it came to.
He had been heard to say by several:
"The best thing that we're put here for's to see;
The strongest thing that's given us to see with's
A telescope. Someone in every town
Seems to me owes it to the town to keep one.
In Littleton it may as well be me."
After such loose talk it was no surprise
When he did what he did and burned his house down.
Mean laughter went about the town that day
To let him know we weren't the least imposed on,
And he could wait—we'd see to him tomorrow.
But the first thing next morning we reflected
If one by one we counted people out
For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long
To get so we had no one left to live with.
For to be social is to be forgiving.
Our thief, the one who does our stealing from us,
We don't cut off from coming to church suppers,
But what we miss we go to him and ask for.
He promptly gives it back, that is if still
Uneaten, unworn out, or undisposed of.
It wouldn't do to be too hard on Brad
About his telescope. Beyond the age
Of being given one for Christmas gift,
He had to take the best way he knew how
To find himself in one. Well, all we said was
He took a strange thing to be roguish over.
Some sympathy was wasted on the house,
A good old-timer dating back along;
But a house isn't sentient; the house
Didn't feel anything. And if it did,
Why not regard it as a sacrifice,
And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire,
Instead of a new-fashioned one at auction?
Out of a house and so out of a farm
At one stroke (of a match), Brad had to turn
To earn a living on the Concord railroad,
As under-ticket-agent at a station
Where his job, when he wasn't selling tickets,
Was setting out up track and down, not plants
As on a farm, but planets, evening stars
That varied in their hue from red to green.
[Continued below . . . ]
[Continued from above . . . ]
ReplyDeleteHe got a good glass for six hundred dollars.
His new job gave him leisure for stargazing.
Often he bid me come and have a look
Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside,
At a star quaking in the other end.
I recollect a night of broken clouds
And underfoot snow melted down to ice,
And melting further in the wind to mud.
Bradford and I had out the telescope.
We spread our two legs as it spread its three,
Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it,
And standing at our leisure till the day broke,
Said some of the best things we ever said.
That telescope was christened the Star-Splitter,
Because it didn't do a thing but split
A star in two or three the way you split
A globule of quicksilver in your hand
With one stroke of your finger in the middle.
It's a star-splitter if there ever was one,
And ought to do some good if splitting stars
'Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood.
We've looked and looked, but after all where are we?
Do we know any better where we are,
And how it stands between the night tonight
And a man with a smoky lantern chimney?
How different from the way it ever stood?
~Robert Frost