The Jupiter-Saturn Great Conjunction

by Brett Rutherford

Goya: Saturn Devouring His Children

Two giants approach, their masses swollen
with age and pride. One, facing us, will pass
before the other, back turned in scornful
enmity. Rings peep like ears from Saturn
as Jupiter and all his companion
satellites take pride of place and orbit.

Back turned to Saturn-Cronos, his father,
Jupiter calls out in scorn: “You, frozen,
turgid in your ever-colder banishment,
you almost ate me once.” No answer comes.

He turns his eye outward, now, accusingly:
“You swallowed my brothers and sisters.
Have you at long last no guilt for your crimes?”
From icy outer rings a bell-tone stirs;
a moon peeps from behind the old planet,
but Saturn, as ever, utters nothing.

Though all was settled long eons ago,
there is no end to conspiracies:
Saturn has eighty-two satellites still
contesting the Olympian election,
clinging to lies and a tyrant’s coat-tails,
while Jupiter is the acknowledged king
with only seventy-nine companions.

“They love me,” boasts Jupiter, “and I, them,
while you have only courtiers bound by dread.”
Now, squinting at sun with his one red eye,
the king of worlds winces as gravity
ever so slightly tugs him back Saturn-ward

and the sullen, yellow-brown cannibal
shrugs, its face and brow inscrutable, its moons
ice-cracked with slogans braying how Jupiter
was not a proper god and the Olympians
were better locked up in their father’s belly,
a fit prison for ill-born imposters.

Nothing will come of the great conjunction,
for the gods as they are, on their planets
wage an incessant strife. Wait twenty years —
it is the same story told once again.
Avert your gaze from Saturn’s armory,
shun Mars and his war-cry. Venus, for love;
fleet Mercury for gods’ inspiration;
Sun ever-rising with beneficent rays;
Moon, the world’s clock with tidal urgings,
and Earth itself, shelter to demigods
and Muses: abide if not obey them,
and leave to Titans the terrors of war.