| 8:52a |
Sf poetry being made; second round; "No Covenant"
Thank you for all of your helpful comments and suggestions, some of which I have used in the revision below; I appreciate each and every one.
I want to point out here this morning what I consider the worst line in the whole poem:
"It took us so long just to learn how to communicate!"
I have to be able to convey that meaning, somehow -- the poem won't work without it -- but "communicate" is all wrong. Wrong tone. Wrong sounds. Wrong rhythm. Just wrong. "It took us so long just to learn how to talk to each other!"[or "... to one another!"] would get rid of "communicate" -- but they don't actually talk. They have no mouths, no vocal tracts, nothing to do bodyparl with; it can't be talking. There's no verb "to telepath," if telepathy is the right word for what's going on. Help in fixing this would be very welcome, because I am truly stuck.
No Covenant
It's being without a body that's the hard part...
And that surprised me.
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 this 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. Grateful. We do know that.
We could all be dead, 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.]
Worse, we could be part of a handful 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 there with what follows --
here I am. Here I am in some where. And I am suffering.
Not in pain, no ... 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 so 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 the Holy One sent us was more than clear.
There it was, posted on the sky,
and in Universal-Translator-fashion we each saw it
[perhaps some people heard it rather than saw it]
in our own native language.
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 world 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 even feel our selves being shucked,
it happened so fast.
We do know it's not heaven -- because of the suffering.
We do know it's not hell -- because there's no pain.
We're wondering now if there are things the bodiless can do,
to make the time go by.
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 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. |