Sf poetry being made; third round (final); "No Covenant"
I am astonished by -- and very grateful for -- the many suggestions you sent me for fixing the line that was giving me so much trouble. It wasn't easy to choose among all those alternatives, and I didn't do it in a hurry; I thought long and hard before deciding. I think that the version below is now final; if you disagree, just let me know. [Note: I will be posting a separate response to the two lengthy comments from dteleki, who does indeed disagree.]

I've made only one change other than the "communicate"-line change. Instead of...

"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."

I've made that...

"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."

I made that change to echo the "we do know"/"we don't know" motifs that come along in the two final stanzas of the poem.

Thank you again for all your help.


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 mindspeech.
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.