In England’s
green and analog land,
you lead me through the years of sand
with wise and light bionic hand
until, upon the altar fell
with ghosts of broken circuits, swell
vocodered waves of hymns. Then hell,
by hosts of sponsors bought and sold
with heat-death coins of bitter cold,
obeisance makes upon the wold.
In digital strains, then, let us sing
glorious songs, to please our king
who makes all forms, like icen ring
that round yon distant planets bound,
quiddities bring. Let then sound
astounding music, amazing sounds.
The
patient never woke
whilst wheeled into the theatre,
and outside, to the mob, there spoke
a
skilled, eloquent orator.
The
surgeon-bot gleamed; it woke
into life like all automata,
but the patient never woke,
whilst
wheeled into the theatre.
The
mob moved, provoked
with the thought of that predator
cutting up men, a computer,
a
machine that they easily broke.
The patient never woke.
I wonder, then, who now reads
that ancient, Spengler, and sees,
with questioning eyes, the wrack
of history. Have they racked
themselves as they wandered just
what thoughts were thought by this dust?
Did they feel the same as us?
Or are our thoughts and feelings
strange,
subject, like stock, stone, to change?
This was a city, now tell:
did feelings die when Rome fell
after millennia had passed?
Perhaps, as cars decayed,
the way we feel, too, shall fade.
This
beautiful planet
we
have arrived at,
that
over a decade
we
first shall make
habitable,
lies
hypnotised
by the light
of a
sun swollen
and
blue. Golden
plains
of dust
shall
eventually erupt
in a
greenish flood
of
grass. But,
at
present I stand
looking
out, and extend
my
sight to the time
a
billion will find
a
home, paying
for
its joys and pains
till
I become faint
as
these days, that fade
as
will dust that spanned
their
once unborn planet.
By
the time we reach midpoint,
you’ll be nearly eighty, and
by the time we make landfall,
so
long ago would the sands
have
stopped falling in your glass,
and who knows if, as you aged,
you ever thought of the night
you
took a spaceman, as raged
a
storm to remember. Cold
may be my sleep now, but when
I wake, I will remember,
as
we orbit the star, then
feel
for sure the gulf that fell
between our encounter gone
a century hence, and still
I’m
living, almost as young.
I
I have yet to dream
of the terrible storms
that circle this globe.
II
At the planet’s heart
a diamond lies,
of an undreamt size.
III
This planet’s all
atmosphere, turned liquid,
solid at heart.
IV
The colours are fair
to the eye, greens
and blues of all hues.
V
The automated mines
scoop the upper air
untouched by storms below.
VI
Soon we’ll have fuel
enough to launch ourselves
to the Oort cloud and beyond
VII
and as it recedes
to nothingness, this eye
of blue and green still shines.
The waves are lovely and luminous
tonight,
and the setting moons sink below
the sea’s horizon. It seems, somehow,
strange that far and foreign I was born,
yet feel at home. Here.
On this shore
a sea desires with seething wavelets
lapping a sand lapidated with dust
fallen from skies fair and pearled
with stars. Strange: I stand upon the shore
and see the sea seething with the light
of organisms brought to break down
an atmosphere a man, or even a plant,
couldn’t breathe. Cold on my faceplate,
a mist melts, like a mystery my breath.