WORLD WAR COVID
Poems, mine and theirs
What Is All this for?
These bodies, ideals and all the rest, to what end?
Mankind assembled, to what goal?
So much genius, effort, sacrifice and strife:
What is that for?
Questions forbidden by science
That gouges out its eyes to see more clearly.
So that some post grad student
Leafing through her brick of notes
Gathered robotically by diligent Grays
From planets finally overcooked,
Ransacked before they puffed out to sterility
Like a poisoned dandelion.
She juggles the contents of her scholar’s purse,
And the quirks of academic politics,
And whether He noticed her that afternoon,
And what solitary supper she will nibble.
She notes, in passing,
“Those primates from Planet Dirt,
They weren’t so dumb after all…
Rather gallant towards the end.”
While she proofs the footnotes of her thesis,
As rain tap taps on her darkened window.
“Trivial,” she must admit, “but almost finished,”
On the succession of gravity well biofilms.
Waves of ancient earthly pioneers
Sailed out into the cosmos at 1G to near-light speed
Then rebounded across the universe like the ripples on a pond
Youth returned, to Earth much more wrinkled and old.
They left so long ago, that much more time elapsed here;
The page of time crumpled into a ball by star travel.
Earth’s time stretched out to millennia, millions, billions of years;
While theirs were hundreds, thousands, millions of years
More or less intermittently.
For four billion years,
Sentience has billowed out from Earth (and elsewhere?)
Ripples across the Cosmos
Flowed back to Earth as dream gods.
Shuffled, beaten, traded, mixed, and mutated;
Added to or cancelled out beyond recognition.
Really advanced technology mimics nature,
The best would be interchangeable with it,
Except the supernatural would re-set to Nature
Like a stage set, presto! at the flip of a switch or a thought.
Set aside those questions unfathomable;
Our souls simply belong closer to God.
Not at the clay feet of unjust gods
Glimpsed in dreams, myths and ruins.
Exiles come back,
Whatever they have done, whatever they mutated into,
Whatever they taught us by good or bad example
Either here and now or far gone or somewhere in between.
Not the God of promises and abandon
“Riddle me this or be damned.”
Of stern warnings and fatal punishment
Of abusive misunderstanding,
Instead, the God of love and straight salvation,
Who shines brighter than the cosmic background
Any three-year-old can understand perfectly
As soon as their parents let them know.
The Old Testament God who judges and punishes
Without love or understanding, He had a Son of His own.
The way a mafia don falls in love with his family,
God learned to love mankind from His Son.
The Alpha and the Omega,
From the Serpent of Eden condemned to crawl in the dust
For having shown good and evil to Adam and Eve.
Sorting good from evil, that is human moral conscience.
To the God of Love’s beloved Son.
The Christ left us the Holy Ghost,
Human conscience of good and evil,
To comfort us pending His Return.
The wages of sin is death,
The knowledge of good and evil leads to death
Jack off and die.
Everyone dies in any case.
Whoever blasphemes against their moral conscience will not be forgiven
Thus everyone remains unforgiven
Outside the simple recitation of the Lord's Prayer.
God shrugs: “What else is new?”
No doctor professor can talk about it clearly,
The Holy Ghost is anyone's guess, they guess.
Based on an old text praising war
That serves every psychopath to renew Hell on Earth.
Five out of six humans agree that we are wrong:
Either the love of Christ is imperfect
Or our interpretation of it.
Our backs must hunch over this once again,
Reinterpret, rejoin, re-belong: do it better.
That belonging will be so much better for us
Than scientific breakthroughs, truth and justice, here below;
As much for us, for her and for the four-foot Grays,
The dinosaurs twice that height, the Vikings finally scrubbed,
The ghosts and the jellyfish in mobile jars
Since all of us long for it.
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