The poor dined on mice in Vienna 
and in Paris it rained blood for a week. 
In Augsberg a cloth shearer’s wife
delivered a babe whose head grew on its back,
its legs turned inward at the knees.

A noble in Rostock enraged
by an impious astronomer’s
ambition to plot the stars
sliced off a piece of his nose:
Be thankful it wasn’t your member.

Tycho Brahe staunched the flow with a rag;
brother Hakan held the flesh in another.
The Surgeon, also Royal Barber,
fixed an unguent: mud, spider webs, bird nests,
applied metallic astringent,

then suggested wax replacement,
but warned avoid hot places.
Tycho, councilor of the realm,
preferred his family’s metalsmith.

In Marseilles, gibbeted bodies were tossed
into the Mediterranean
amid a plague of dolphins.

The Astronomer believed
all things connected–his blasphemy.