Sirius With Non-Sequitur Poem by Paul Hartal

A scintillant Sirius shines in the night sky.
It twinkles in fiery red and in bright blue.

I watch the majestic firmament
wondering about the distance
of the mysterious Dog Star
from Earth in the galactic queue.

Oh, the glorious Sirious,
scientists say,
this binary star system,
in the Canis Major Constellation
is separated from us by 8.6 light years.

And then I think
of another place and of another time.
And I remember that I read somewhere
that in ancient Egypt the brief moment
of the heliacal rising
of Sirius the glorious,
when the Dog Star
first became visible
on the eastern horizon,
signaled the flooding of the Nile River.

But for the Polynesians it meant winter.

Well, seen from the Earth,
Sirius is the brightest star in the sky.
Yet the much smaller planets Jupiter,
Venus and Mars outshine it.

But then
the planets of the Solar system
are much closer to us than Sirius
the Dog Star.
However, Jupiter, Venus and Mars
do not twinkle.

And I recall, a poet once
asked a deeply serious question:
What is closer to you?
Sirius or your fellow human being?