| 11:06a |
Sf poetry being made; first draft; "No Covenant"
I have spent more than two years trying to do this narrative as a short story, and I have gotten nowhere doing that. It's not the longest time I ever spent struggling with a short story -- it took me ten years to write "Lest Levitation Come Upon Us" -- but I am convinced that this time it's hopeless. However, I'd like to try it as a poem that we could perhaps work on together, if you're willing. Here's a very rough draft...
"No Covenant" [working title]
It's being without a body that's the hard part.
Which was surprising.
No hunger or thirst; no lust. No pain.
No urinating or defecating or menstruating or any-other-ating.
No brushing your teeth. No washing your hair.
So far as we know right now, no illness,
although some of us wonder if we should count on that.
I mean, even when we still had bodies people talked, sometimes
about "spiritual illnesses."
But no colds, no cancers, no AIDS, no TB, no heart attacks;
none of that kind of illness, ever any more.
In the abstract it sounds like perfection.
In the real world [or whatever this is we're inhabiting],
it turns out to be hard to bear.
For instance, you never really know where you are.
Not that there's anywhere left to be, exactly --
but we used to know where we were because we could feel
our bodies touching a chair or a bed or a path.
Even when we were falling through air,
we were feeling the pull of whatever we were falling toward.
We knew where our head was and where our feet were;
we knew where up and down were, and where the center was.
Not any more.
We should be thankful, we should be grateful; we do know that.
We could all be dead, for example, wiped out like the dinosaurs
the way most of humankind died in the Great Flood.
[We find the story of the Great Flood more believable now
than we did before.]
Worse, we could be part of a handful of human beings who survived,
struggling to go on living on a devastated planet,
in misery.
Instead, here -- well, there's no here, really,
but the word still needs to be with what follows --
here I am. And I am suffering.
I'm not in pain, but I am suffering.
I know the difference now.
It took us so long just to learn how to communicate!
If we hadn't been desperate to find one another --
if we hadn't just been screaming the names of those we loved
at the top of our minds --
we might never have learned.
The message we got was certainly clear enough.
There it was, posted on the sky,
and in Universal-Translator-fashion we all saw it
[perhaps some people heard it rather than saw it]
in our own native language. And this is what it said:
"I'm disgusted. I'm entirely out of patience.
You've wrecked one world,
I'm not going to waste another one on you!
Get ready for a change of status."
And that was it. It was a briefer warning
than babies got when they left the world of the womb
for the world beyond it.
[Some of us think that may have been a mercy.]
One minute we were humankind, embodied, living on Earth;
one breath later we were bodiless, living none of us knows where.
We didn't feel our selves being shucked, it happened so fast.
We're not in heaven, though; we're sure of that.
There wouldn't be suffering in heaven.
We're wondering now if there are things the bodiless can do.
Think about it; at first we didn't know
we could "talk" to one another.
And then we learned that we could.
Is there more that we could do?
We don't know.
What we do now: Is it flying? Is it floating?
We don't know.
Is it forever?
We don't know. |