Title: Twenty Two, Oh Two, Twenty Twenty Two
Fandom: Original, Astronomy & Cosmology, Doctrine of Labyrinths, Hexarchate
Challenge: Revision
Other Prompt: The date 22 02 2022
Rating: G
Length: 222
Content notes: N/A
Author notes: Thanks go to Zhie & Runa for encouragement & sanity-checking.
Written & posted on 22 02 2022 somewhere still!
Summary: A meditation on days, numbers, calendars and other ephemera



Twenty Two, Oh Two, Twenty Twenty Two

An arbitrary system, this, of numbers careful set,
Revised, reset, recalculated and renamed
Oh, centuries and ages long ago in counted days
By emperors and scholars, priests and kings,
Those who count and measure stars
Those who auger by them, wandering and fixed
How else to know what days to celebrate
What dates propitiate with song or salt of fragrant smoke?
Start anew or mourn the dead, pace the stately round
In orderly progression

Our orbit fixed, the quarters of the Sun advance betimes
Rotation set by gravity and physics not by fiat.
Hours though are choice: how to divide a day?
Measure a month against a moon of phases odd in number?
Segment a season of the sun?
Time measures not itself but at devise
of mind and hand and will
In clocks and kalends, septads and indictions,
Candlemarks and glasses filled
With grains of measured sand.

And when the numbers chime in timely glee,
Make patterns, symmetry, and palindromes
The days that please in annual appearance,
As Pi and Tau and May the Fourth; Or arrangements
Seen but once, many years until the next alike.
Thus this date, a delight of twos
With day and month and year all twins:
Hail 22 02 2022, twos and naughts
In pairs and patterns, Let us now rejoice
In temporal, ephemeral, numerical delight