First Term of Cancer
To Mars, 0° Cancer 00’  to 7° Cancer 59’ 

The Playroom

The parent hopes for the child’s success,
and raises them up with righteous teaching —
does all parenting require duress?
What customs are fair to break when reaching
for perfection? Thou, lord Mars, seek glory
when rearing a child to godly life:
perhaps, in pursuit of saintly story,
you used the belt, the birch switch, or the knife,
or — with crueler kindness — a mother’s grace
that punished with disappointment and wrath
and only praised with pained and pretend face
each contest lost in soccer or in math.
The kid snapped at last, all the neighbors guess:
murdered the mom, and left the house a mess.

A mother greets the daughter on the sidelines of an athletic contest.

As some readers know, my Patreon supporters at the $3 tier and $5 tier are getting all five poems for the Chaldean Terms of the Zodiac as they come out each month this year. The poems were written over the course of the last several years, commemorating the deaths of people I knew, and acknowledging that the Terms (sometimes called the Bounds in astrology) are historically associated with the risks and tribulations and dramatics of death — that is, it’s when our chart encounters changes in the terms that some risks arise and others diminish. Sooner or later, one of those risks is going to get us.

Each poem consists of a title, a sonnet, and a visual image which may be drawn as a magical picture, or as an image for the purposes of contemplation. In the final version of the hymns, which I’ll release in some formats next year or the year after, I may choose to include some of the magical purposes to which I’ve put these images and poems in the last half-decade.

As part of a way to encourage more people to be supporters of this project, I’ve published the sonnets for the first term of each sign here. You can find the First Term of Aries and the First Term of Taurus here already, and the others will come out in the due course of time.

If you’d like to support the release of these poems to the public, as a sort of “astrologically based guide to risks of death”, then please support my Patreon at either the $3 or $5 tier.

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