Following in the tradition of revealing my trunk stories years after I’ve written them, I would like to share a poem I wrote lo’ those many years ago. I didn’t understand poetry fully then (still don’t) but something about the imagery in a few lines of this poem were evocative enough that I thought to finish the whole thing. Enjoy!
Once Upon A Time
We remember fables from childhood:
How the synthetic greenery
Of Old Earth
Once bled to a black clot.
Where ebony graves
Were tucked snug in the
Cracks of desert floors,
And ebbing ocean tides
Orphaned continents
Whose true names we’d long forgot;
Then, that Earth was stripped bare
Of fuel rich mineral guts:
As a cancer grew deep in her lungs.
As we survived and
crusaded to the vastest reaches
Of space.
Alone,she squandered her infinite lives,
Star-gifted to planets,
To bring breath to a choked sky
Struggling with certainty,
Grappling with fate.
When transient echoes of life
Were heard, across time and space
On another home, an adopted Earth,
We felt the stasis of a planet,
We thought dead,
Only a myth.
Again there were verdant swatches,
Oceans kissing land,
The uncanny shuffling of mountains
Creasing continental brows,
And all the beleaguered triumphs
Of the civilizations which followed
To the stumbling cadence
Of nature’s paradigms.
Now, we quest across the cosmos,
Seeking a home old as time,
Turning revolutions, far, far, away.
How long before her breath gives,
How much longer can she live?
-A.
Aruninations 