Poem: Ever Moving

Ever Moving

Ever moving, yet Orion holds his

Quiver and bow the same every night?

Aren’t those stars moving in orbit just as 

They, in turn, are orbited by planets?

Yet we see our mythical Orion

Seemingly the same as years before now

And his image is mentioned in ancient

Scripts thousands of years old ever the same.

We may be doing the very same thing

In our constant evolutions we show,

As if on a cinema screen, the same

Constant existence in beautiful myths

In a sky all our own that we know naught

About—ever moving, ever sinning,

Ever beautiful in an eternal

Screening of a story we know nothing—

Not a single thing—about.

January 2025

About This Poem

The inspiration for this poem was the constellation Orion on a January night. I'm fascinated by the fact that all the universe is moving constantly, yet we can see the same image of a constellation every night for centuries, even millennia. Do our constant movements also form a single image like the constellations? Is it too much human hubris to think so? Or is it too much modesty to not think so? I don't know, but this poem touches on those questions and the fact that we never think about that (with the exception, maybe of this poem and a few other infrequent human musings seldom mentioned anywhere). The photo is just an iPhone photo of the Big Dipper (Ursa Major) in my back yard. I would post one of Orion, but I can't find any.