This year’s winter solstice is pretty much like last year
With singing and drinking filling folks with good cheer.
Why does this happen periodically?
Because the Earth is tilted to its plane of orbit
The Earth’s axis is tilted: twenty-three degrees.

The Earth’s solar orbit illuminates our north sky
Then six months later it’s the south’s turn to fry.
It’s simply envisioned, gyroscopically.
Earth’s axis of rotation, while circling in its orbit
Maintains an inclination of twenty-three degrees.

And now, in December, there’s hardly any sunlight
And up north in Reykjavik the whole day is night.
But daylight’s returning, automatically.
Because the Earth is tilted to its plane of orbit,
The Earth’s axis is tilted: twenty-three degrees.

With our glasses clinking, it’s not to Jesus’ birthday
Or to the Maccabees that we toast today.
No, it is simple, astronomically.

Terrae proclinatae, (Of the leaning Earth)
Ambitum laudamus . (We praise the orbit.)
Venite extollamus (Come, let us extol)
Terram, Dominam. (The Earth, our Lord.)

  ©2024 Stephen Baird MD

Note: Some researchers of the trial of Galileo Galilei by the Inquisition for defending Copernicanism, have speculated that this fragment of Latin verse to Adeste Fidelis was surreptitiously written by Galileo after he was sentenced to house arrest for the last eight years of his life. But critics suggest that this looks too much like American high school Latin and is therefore a modern forgery.