Oulipian Horoscopes.... keep your brain limber

An acquaintance of mine started a Facebook group called "Echo Spoor," an online workshop for literature in the style of the oulipians (those who've read Christian Bok will be familiar). They imposed strict rules on their writing, "believing that formal constraints were liberatory".

People can create "echo spoors" - poetry derived from horoscopes.

The rules: use only the letters, words and punctuation in your daily, weekly, or monthly horoscopes to write "your" poems. you may not repeat words or punctuation.

My poem is derived from Rob Brezny's Scorpio horoscope for this week. I had thought with all the talk of "workmen", "entering the body", etc this would be a bit more risque.... turns out Weil infuses all with her love of the Godhead ...


When waiting for passage,
Keep in mind the mystic and political activist,
Entering our tired world of
Order and beauty,
Suffering and hurt,
Redemptive pain.
His coming is the expression of love.


(Horoscope):
In her book Waiting for God, French mystic and political activist Simone Weil (1909-1943) wrote a passage I'd love for you to keep in mind during the coming weeks: "When an apprentice gets hurt, or complains of being tired, the workmen have this fine expression: 'It is the trade entering his body.' Each time that we have some pain to go through, we can say to ourselves quite truly that it is the order and beauty of the world that are entering our body." I encourage you, Scorpio, to adopt this redemptive attitude about the suffering you have been experiencing.