121018c

Dyson sphere
turns its back on the world
the end of night

033118b

the egg is cracked

dim sun
shines through rents

light sails somewhere
carry refugees
we study the quadrillion dead

111113

Perelandra Pays Our Debt


sub-light war is hell
times hell itself.
our veterans who made it back,
those few humanomorphs
of all the myriads sent,
blinked at a millennium
that ill-remembered war;
the young travelers were
stone chippers in metropolis,
lobe-fins on a mountaintop--
to assimilate they'd have to die--
we owed them more.

in the end a habitat reserve
was set aside,
for our returning heroes,
it revolved a few hundred kilometers
inside the Dyson sphere,
a matt-black moon.

time dilation left them ill-prepared
for our teratogenic society,
students visited them
in human guise,
and many theses wrote,
till one visitor, a tertiamorph,
fell in young with
a handsome virusiare first class,
she, 26 years young/28 kiloyears old,
could never see her lover's
natal form.

so now we thaw the banks of frozen oldsters,
a few each year,
send them in, sterile,
to keep things interesting,
and mumble thanks when its shadow comes,
to our black soldier moon.



end



I recognize my debt to our veterans. They need more than just this day.