Within Ourselves – a poem by Kate Rauner

Chinese Zodiac

Do the planets mark our hours?

Set our weaknesses, our powers?

From Babylon by way of Rome,

Or from the Middle Kingdom’s home,

From jyotish of Hindustan,

Come horoscopes on vendors’ stands.

Feckless woman, foolish man;

What chance provides, take in your hand.

Mishaps and luck, our loves and fears

Dance not to music of the spheres.

You will find, if you delve,

“The fault not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

I end this poem with a paraphrase of the famous line from Shakespeare‘s play Julius Caesar (Act 1, scene 2). The nobleman Cassius says to Brutus, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.’  I thought the words I used were close enough to deserve quotation marks.

Comparison of the sizes of planets, from Wikipedia