Saturday, December 22, 2007

Look!

Look!
By
James Robert Smith

Look how FAR
we’ve come,
they brag
(as if they’d done it themselves).
Jumbo jets!
Computers!
DVD players!
Interstate highways!
Skyscrapers!
Sewage systems!
Automobiles!
Modern medicine!
MORE computers!
Cell phones!
Satellites!
Space stations!
Planetary probes!
We’re great! We’re #1,
they say.
But do they EVER
stop to think
that we should have
achieved all that
stuff
500 years ago?
1,000 years ago?
That we should be
sitting, perhaps,
in the laps of the gods in
Paradise,
either here on Earth
or in orbit around
Betelgeuse? or Barnard’s Star?
or Proxima Centauri?
Or hauling black holes
around the Universe like tinker toys
while Yahweh kisses our ass?
No. I doubt
that ever occurs
to them.



2 comments:

Wayne Allen Sallee said...

Myself, I'd go to Wolf 359 first. Mostly because it was in an OUTER LIMITS episode. Probably a better place than the US right now.

James Robert Smith said...

Which episode was that? When I was a kid, I was the odd man out (haha!), in that my friends all preferred Twilight Zone, while I liked Outer Limits the best. Nothing freaked me out so much as the introduction of each episode of OL. It still freaks me out.