Daily Cascade

This Cursed Earth

Prompt:
If someone told you that a group of stars are going to appear in a certain pattern, foretelling an ancient curse is about to come true. Would you believe it or would you think of it as nonsense? And would you make up a story about it?

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Making up a story about it would be such fun, but then making up a story about anything is a lot of fun.

As to believing the cock-a-doodle-doo about the star patterns and an ancient curse, it is not my forte. But I can weave a few words around it, can't I!

Well, okay, here it goes, just maybe a bit on the dark side, but then, isn't a curse's place on the dark side, anyway?

This Cursed Earth

Across the night, they speak
in patterns of light, coiled like serpents,
hunters, swans, and that lion's mane,
burning again with hidden lore
I close my eyes and whisper, "No more!"

a mortal that I am, for a curse has bloomed
in Orion's belt and I hear my dead mother
weeping, from Virgo's veil, never to be seen again
Yet, old gods and rivers mirror the flame
beneath the soil and whisper my name,

for Leo's lamp is on our humanity's failing,
etched in burning runes, for the night
is now a tomb for this earth, which scars
the heavens with its long-forgotten moon's game,
and I am caught in the net of an ancient flame.