my darling Saturn

Hello my beauty
you spin and sail slowly
with your paper-thin rings in silence.
Everything in its place
eon ofter eon.
In your one slow pass around the sun
I have been born and grown to thirty.

One of your moons has lakes and weather.
Another spews water into space.
Your rings of pebbles are beyond art.
Tiny shephard moons keep the ring-beauty in place.
I could go on and on.
About dazzling beauty.
About baffling mystery.

But here on Earth,
We've got other things to worry about.
How to pay the bills,
and well basically, how to pay the bills.

And so science is what we see on TV.
Crafted and contrived by the feudal priest-lords.

Science is explained by past heroes.
Past heroes
who were somehow fearless enough
to dare to be curious.

Those were different times.

Now it's all figured out.

And so.
Saturn has a hexagon at its north pole.
A hexagon floating in the clouds as storms swirl around it.
We can send ships to Mars and back
but can't imagine how to do that:
how to float a hexagon in stormy clouds.

The photograph of the century. CNN et al, seemed not to care. Far from bolting upright in their seats like I did, the scientific community offered up not a peep. In a week the photo and story were buried in banality.

A fabulous, unexplainable image is beamed back to Earth, from a craft sent to find the unknown, and no one is even curious? Hail victory to the powers that be. The powers that be assuming for themselves more and more of free peoples' power.

But I do not accept this defeat.

My darling Saturn, queen of the deep, born as I was on Saturday, I am amazed by you.
In ages hence, a free people may come to care how you can make a hexagon stand in your clouds. Until then, forgive them because they are too damn busy worrying about how to get by in one of the richest places on this rich, rich planet.

I am not defeated.
I look out, far above the castles of the petty feudal lords, and I am amazed at what I do not know. Yet I know that it is of the same stuff as me. A hexagon standing in your stormy clouds. Indeed.

I stared at you tonight through hazy city skies.
In thanks.