Member Poem

The Last Star Show

We gather near the still wildly
swaying pendulum and observe our solar
system, ungracefully fallen;

Earth and Moon
tossed  into a far corner, mighty Jupiter
cracked open like an egg;

Mercury and Venus broken into
pieces, Saturn resting upon its crushed outer
rings by a gushing water fountain;

Mars balanced upon a scale -
temporarily out of order - that shows one's
relative weight upon the planets;

Pluto, Uranus, and Neptune
mysteriously disappeared down a darkened
hallway, and the Sun gone rogue,

shattering a glass display case filled
with antique clocks and watches, their hands
frozen by the tectonic event.

The dreamscape shifts now, and we're
inside the darkened ruins of the planetarium,
its great projector crashed to the floor

like a praying mantis swatted by a
giant hand, pieces of the white dome fallen 
to the cracked floor letting the

true moon and stars within,
obscured by fingers of smoke-tinged fog,
which turn into sweat as I jolt

awake in the dead of the night along
the fault line, upon this ever shifting orb
we ironically call terra firma. 

--G. O. Clark