Happy (belated) National Poetry Day!

[DaddyHoggy]

the thargoid guns
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zapp zapp zapp zapp
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by S Baldrick

[Kaks]

the thargoid guns
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zapp zapp zapp zapp
zapp zapp zapp

zapp zapp zapp zapp
zapp zapp zapp

by S Baldrick

Boom boom!
by B. Brush

[Disembodied]

A HOME IN SPACE

Laid-back in orbit, they found their minds.
They found their minds were very clean and clear.
Clear crystals in swarms outside were their fireflies and larks.
Larks they were in lift-off, swallows in soaring.
Soaring metal is flight and nest together.
Together they must hatch.
Hatches let the welders out.
Out went the whitesuit riggers with frames as light as air.
Air was millions under lock and key.
Key-ins had computers wild on Saturday nights.
Nights, days, months, years they lived in space.
Space shone black in their eyes.
Eyes, hands, food-tubes, screens, lenses, keys were one.
One night – or day – or month – or year – they all –
all gathered at the panel and agreed –
agreed to cut communication with –
with the earth base – and it must be said they were –
were cool and clear as they dismantled the station and –
and gave their capsule such power that –
that they launched themselves outwards –
outwards in an impeccable trajectory, that band –
that band of tranquil defiers, not to plant any –
any home with roots but to keep a –
a voyaging generation voyaging, and as far –
as far as there would ever be a home in space –
space that needs time and time that needs life.

—Edwin Morgan
New Selected Poems, Carcanet Press, 2000.



I like Edwin Morgan's work, as you might gather! In a time when much of the "literary" community still sneers at SF (see for example the recent debate over the Booker prize), it's good to have a major literary figure who refuses to bow down to genre pigeonholing. It's also good to have artists who see science and technology as a source of hope, and promise, and not something to be feared and sneered at.

[Cmdr Wyvern]

It's also good to have artists who see science and technology as a source of hope, and promise, and not something to be feared and sneered at.

+100

Between luddites and retrogrouches who fear technological progress, and zealoticals who see science as a challenge to dogma, it's a tough uphill battle.

We'd be having thriving colonies on mars and beyond, if it wasn't for the antiscience and antitech nutters doing all they could to keep mankind ignorant.

"Don't insist on praying in my lab, and I won't teach rocket science in your church. By the way, Darwin is still right."

[Lestradae]

Absolutely seconded, Cmdr Wyvern