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Pleiades Janet Kuypers inspired by the call for poetry about constellations in the “Heavenly Bodies” 2014 poetry project started 1/15/14, finished part 1 1/20/14 My eyes have always been drawn to the stars in the night sky. The youngest of three sisters, I always looked for something more until I saw the seven sisters together from our view of the universe. My mother, rest her soul, saw me looking at the night sky once. She might know the Big Dipper, so I asked her to look up high to one point in the night sky. “See what looks like a dipper, about the size of your thumb nail?” I asked. “Yes, I see it.” Well, I’d tell her that’s a little star cluster, those seven stars are called the seven sisters, they’re the Pleiades cluster. # In the Pakistan Urdu language, Pleiades is ‘Parvin’, a symbol of beauty, and was a term used for a beautiful woman, like my mom. In Greek Mythology, the Pleiades are the ‘seven sisters’, because when their father Atlas was forced to carry the heavens on his shoulders, the hunter Orion chased his daughters, so he put his daughters in th sky, where Orion still follows them to this day. In esoteric astrology, the seven solar systems revolve around Pleiades in the night sky, where we could almost see traces of the Milky Way cutting our night sky in half. In the Southern Hemisphere, the Pleiades cluster rose at harvest, giving abundance to the world, as my mother did to my childhood. But in Celtic mythology during the Bronze Age, the Pleiades cluster was connected to mourning, and even funerals, because around Halloween (and the mourning “Day of the Dead”), everyone saw Pleiades rise in the east just as the sun set in the west. But I don’t want those seven sisters to mourn for my mother, I want the memory of showing these stars to my mother to be something that makes me smile when I look up at the night sky.

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