Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,
And all thy heart lies open unto me.

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me
Alfred Lord Tennyson

Many of us are used to witnessing the predictable rhythms of the earth’s seasons but look up to the night sky and the same annual patterning is occurring there. The constellation Taurus now dominates the Northern hemisphere sky and tonight will be the peak of the Northern Taurid meteor shower as the earth passes through the debris of comet Encke or its asteroid 2004 TG₁₀ [source].

Occasionally this cosmic debris enters our atmosphere and remains embedded as visitor in our earth, as illustrated by C. S. Lewis’ ‘The Meteorite’:

“...Thus easily can Earth digest 
A cinder of sidereal fire, 
And make her translunary guest 
The native of an English shire. 
Nor is it strange these wanderers 
Find in her lap their fitting place, 
For every particle that's hers 
Came at the first from outer space. 
All that is Earth has once been sky; 
Down from the sun of old she came, 
Or from some star that travelled by 
Too close to his entangling flame...” [more]

And coincidentally this week I came across Jeffrey Angles “The Usage of Returns” [translated from the Japanese by the author)

“...there are also cyclical returns 
the rebirth of the moon in the blackest night 
the eruption of green after rain 
the angled migration of geese back north…

my return has neither start nor finish 
mine is the return of the plane that draws 
its silver arc then turns back the way it came 
mine is the return abandoning the safety of the written line 
for emptiness where no words await” [more]

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So for today’s MTB prompt we too are returning to a French poetry form but one we have not had before on dVerse. It’s very similar to the more familiar Quatern but for today we focus on The Retourne

• 16 lines made up of 4 quatrains
• 8 syllables per line
• a tumbling refrain using the last 3 lines of the first stanza thus:
  xABC Axxx Bxxx Cxxx.
• unrhymed

Here is an example – abandoned

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Once you have written and posted your poem, according to the guidelines above, do add it to Mr Linky below then go visiting and reading other contributors as that is half the fun of our dVerse gatherings.
Please also TAG dVerse in your post, or include a link at the end of your poem that leads readers back to this dVerse prompt

[N.B. Mr Linky closes Saturday 3 p.m. EST]