Oh, Zolar

The summer after my 6th grade year, my Nerd Self went into full bloom. While happy children played baseball and bicycled in the outside air, I went to the library. In fact, I went to the library so much that my mother became worried.

You have to understand the irony of this. She was a bookish person herself, a journalist, a reader, a writer and that year an antique dealer. I had consumed everything in her shop except a book entitled Strange Fruit that she wouldn't let me read, presumably for its hot and steamy content and not for the violence against oppressed people. I had just shrugged and walked the three blocks to the city library, which in my small town in New Mexico took up some of the space in the court house.

That summer I read anything I could get my hands on, often up to four books a day. I read so many back issues of the Reader's Digest that I was on a first name basis with Joe's Liver, could quote Humor in Uniform, had aced all of the word games and read all the condensed books. I joked that I had graduated from the Reader's Digest School of Medicine.

I also tore through the metaphysical section and read everything: Palmistry, cartomancy, astrology, hypnotism (which I considered to be misidentified as metaphysical), UFO's, ghost stories, the whole magilla. You name it Woo and I read it. I wanted to know about what had happened to me all my life, astral projections, whistling up the wind, knowing things about people just by touching the things they had owned. Some of the fun things I found were the Zolar books, especially Zolar's It's All in the Stars.

I didn't get much past sun sign astrology in the meager pickings of a Bible Belt county library, but many years and many books later, I have come to view the Zolar books with affection. So, in honor of those first moments of studying esoteric subjects, and in honor of those who seek help and consolation from unusual sources, I have written a poem called "Oh, Zolar", a reflection worthy of Mercury in Retrograde, I hope.

Oh Zolar – by Marcia McCord, 2015

Oh Zolar, shall I tell you my heart?

Or is it already too plain in my chart?

My path full of fears,

My lovelife in tears,

And Fortune, where is thy part?

Oh, Zolar, shall I be married?

In libraries too long I have tarried,

Ignoring the looks

In favor of books,

And now I am nigh to be buried!

Oh, Zolar, does Sun ever-bright

Sift through the stars of the night

And down past the trees,

Rain clouds and breeze?

Oh, Zolar, tell me my plight!

Oh, Zolar, was ever a Moon

In the right spot for more than a noon?

Too hot or too cold,

To young or too old,

My feelings always slightly off-tune.

Oh, Zolar, I have Mercury rising.

A chatterbox? I’m just surmising.

It controls all my egress,

Transgress, progress and regress

In Pisces, a seabreeze surprising.

Oh, Zolar, tell me, between us,

Can there be an aspect of Venus

To make me a cutie

With the slightest of beauty

Like the glittering jewels a queen has?

Oh, Zolar, look at my stars

And find me some strapping young Mars,

With all of his powers

Not dimmed by the hours

Nor shrunken with blight or catarrh.

By Jupiter! Shall increase be mine

With other than rich foods and wine?

The nights all alone

With but an ice cream cone

Are pushing me over the line.

Oh, Zolar, is Saturn gentle,

Its effects on me just elemental?

Is my short height dependent

On well-aspected Ascendant,

And my eighth house merely a rental?

Oh, Zolar, can you see Neptune clearly

Opposing my Sun? Can it merely

Be the Avalon mists

That keep hiding my lists,

Synesthesia I cherish so dearly?

Oh, Zolar, to Uranus now turn,

The Tau of a t-square, I learn

Means explosive creativity

And peculiar nativity,

My lightning-struck Tower of churn.

And dear Zolar, my karma defend

From a Pluto I hardly call friend.

Inconjunct in a Yod

With fogged Neptune is odd.

Beg Mercury' s mercy! The end.

Best wishes!