Somnambulist

Scrabble is not really a word game; it's a mathematical game played by weirdly obsessive people who do abusive things to the English language.  Also, as a biologist and a research professor studying climate change, I suffer from seasonal poetry allergies.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Syzygy

The stars blaze bright,

Unblurred by urban haze

That dimmed them, stole them --

A moment, a millennium ago --

From my childish gaze.

Viewed from this far-flung vantage

Deep in snow and silence

Orion stands undaunted,

The obsidian sky so timeless

That the dimmer details

Shine as lucid, as proud

As blue-white Rigel’s

Spectroscopic binary and Alpha Cygni variable primary.

Wide-eyed with wonder,

My own child looks, and points,

And asks about those fainter stars

Dangling from the constellation’s belt.

“Um, no,” I tell her. 

“That’s supposed to be his sword.”

Petrichor

My hands sink deep in loam,

Green-scented shoots exulting:

Live, live, live –

Waking from their fractal snowflake blanket

Rain-distilled and cleansed by sunlight.

Natural as wind,

As breath,

As birth,

As laughter.

Also natural as polio and damaging UV rays

And that spiny Amazonian fish, Vandellia cirrhosa.

Yeah.  That one.

Pentameter

I’ll wax iambic for five feet per line

And eulogize the symmetry of sound;

The assonance euphonious, labyrinthine;

The semblance of philosophy profound.

If onomatopoeia rings its chime

The tintinnabulation will be blithe,

The susurrus mellifluous, sublime,

The plink and chink and tinkle nimbly lithe.

And if a dactyl sets me widdershins,

Elision, anaptyxis let me cheat.

So anapest, clandestine, underpins

Nefarious trochee, erstwhile incomplete.

The sonnet’s lures snare logophilic nerds

Who wallow mathematically in words.

Luminescent

No matter how remote you are,

I’ll leave a light on --

A suffusing, fierce, embracing glow

That banishes the shadows;

A clear bright gleam that burns and waits,

Waits and burns,

An hour, a month, a year...

Even if unheeded, unneeded, unanswered,

Still it will shine, true and steady,

For you, for you, for you. 

It will not sap all energy or incinerate all hope.

It will not consume itself in its own endless heat.

It will not, in the fruitless space of decades, flicker and burn out.

These new-fangled LED bulbs sure are fantastic.

Apophenia

In raindrops coursing on the windowpane

I feel the rhythm of a long-forgotten chorus.

In ebbing evanescent clouds

I read a legend and a mystery.

The chaos of the circle’s ratio

Begs and whispers of the rational.

And in this complex dataset

I see pattern, shape, logic, reason,

Meaning, and truth – a bright epiphany --

Even though it totally isn’t there.

Crap.