Friday, March 12, 2010

March 5th, 2010

Born in 1960, I was raised in
the era of space exploration.
I believed that technology
would save us and the earth from us.

Yet here in 2010 we’ve never been to Mars
and Pan Am doesn’t have a moon shuttle.
The space station floating above us
isn’t filled with jumpsuited pioneers.
There are no Dyson spheres or flying cars.
HAL died years ago;
there’s no Rosie the robot maid.

Sagan’s billions and billions of stars
are still up there, but
they’re harder than ever to see.
Under chemical skies and
seas of floating plastic,
the forests still disappear and
rivers don’t reach the sea.

Cities are filled with suicide bombers
disguised as fast food franchises.
The tallest buildings house the
Kings of politics and industry
while famine, poverty, and war
feed on the masses.
The earth tries hard to shrug us off.

I seem to recall that our generation
was going to fix all this, but
we seem to have lost the path, and
evidently we didn’t all die before we got old.

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