The Sky Scratchers

These: the star-crossed brothers
The men who would be gods 
Send satellites to space 
To hide the track lines of their addiction
In plain sight. 
Wrangling hidden beasts by night 
Taurus, Aries, Ursa Major... 
No consolation. 
No direction. No Australis or Polaris.
No big bang.
Just crisscross scars
And a scream so small
In the dome of all creation - 
A fever dream forgotten by the blinding light of dawn. 

Look up!
We are already trillionaires. 
Part of a priceless constellation.

I don’t think I’m alone in feeling saddened by the domestication of the night sky. My father, Brian, gave me direction in all sorts of ways – not least by teaching me to find the North Star by following an imaginary line upwards from one side of The Plough, for those of us living in the northern hemisphere an instantly recognisable asterism which is part of Ursa Major, the Great Bear constellation. To this day I use it to anchor myself in the ocean of space and time. But it isn’t holding fast.

Back then, at my father’s side, satellites were literally few and far between and largely unseen. Today (July 2027) there are an estimated 17,500 in orbit around the earth and that number is increasing rapidly with regular launches of payloads by the likes of Elon Musk’s Space X. He and his billionaire tech bros are the sky scratchers of the title.