Astropoetica: Then she asked, by Danny Rosen

Then she asked
if I was a Cancer
and I thought
of the zodiacal light
rising in the east that morning
above the Wyoming basin.
Saturn hanging by a bull’s horn,
Orion lying down
on the horizon waking
for another day
of chasing the pleiad girls.

A crab? Perhaps
if she thought me
Leo or Aries
I would have answered
less brusquely.
“No.” I said,
“I’m an astronomer.”

Danny Rosen directs the portable Western Sky Planetarium that he takes into schools and communities throughout Colorado and Utah providing astronomy education programs. He works a few months a year for a safari company in southern Africa teaching wilderness guides about the sky and sharing poems around the campfire. He lives with Jack the Dog in western Colorado.