PAD Day 12: Beethoven and Disney in Outer Space

Before I start, let me mention my poetic buddy Vince Gotera, who also does the poem-a-day challenge every April and takes his prompts from the same two blogs as I do. That's actually how we met, trading compliments for each others' poetry one April several years ago. He's given me a couple of shout-outs this month, so I owe him at least one. His blog is The Man with the Blue Guitar, and it's well worth a visit. He shares it with his poet friend Thomas Alan Holmes. Go and read their daily poem posts - you won't regret it. 

Today's prompts are kind of similar in they are both word prompts, in a way. Write Better Poetry says to use the following words in a poem: great, play, season, race, convict, voice. NaPoWriMo invites us to review two reference sources - Lempriere's Classical Dictionary and The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, then take at least one word, concept or idea from each one and work them into a poem. 

Lempriere's reference book is over 800 pages long, full of detailed mythological references, and its scanned PDF copy is not easy to read, especially since it appears to be the original 1812 edition, complete with archaic typeface, like the s's that look like lower-case f's. What I did was pick a random page (427, the month and day of my upcoming birthday) and found something interesting to use. It's a  tale I hadn't heard before, about a war which started at a wedding, between centaurs and a race of people called the Lapiths. The science fiction dictionary is considerably shorter, listing terms from various science fiction works and the year they were coined. I picked page 27 at random and found the most fascinating term on the page to be "space tan: a tan caused by being in space, exposed to the light of suns unfiltered by planetary atmospheres." So how do I work six random words, plus a Roman myth and a science fiction term, into one poem? Not easily....

Beethoven and Disney in Outer Space

 
Listening to Beethoven's great Pastoral Symphony,
I can't help thinking of the cartoon from Fantasia,
that bucolic romp of mythical characters to the music,
centaurs and unicorns, cherubs and satyrs,
and fat drunken Bacchus, sloshing wine all about,
as they celebrate the spring season, playing and cavorting
till Jupiter crashes the party with a fistful of lightning bolts.
Life wasn't always idyllic for the centaurs, though.
They raised a ruckus after too much wine
at a wedding, which quickly became a small war
with the Lapiths, an altercation they say was incited
by Mars, pissed off that he wasn't invited.
All this rolls around in my head as we pass angry Mars,
racing on our way beyond majestic Jupiter, and from there
heading with conviction toward Alpha Centauri,
our next-nearest star, and its habitable planet.
We are space-tanned and ready to be a new voice
in the universe, challenging the gods.