Regarding the Memory of Earth
by Angela Acosta

Composed by a homo sapien sapien

1 AU from Sol in 2021 CE 

 

In time, Rome will fall again.

New technologies will go beyond

our wildest dreams and nightmares.

English will require translation, and

tectonic plates will melt over our plastic mess

until: Pangea Proxima, mass extinction events,

Sol consuming terra, marching towards

the heat death of the universe.

 

Are there any voyagers left from spaceship Earth?

Will any wanderers read our inscriptions from the Milky Way?

When will our biological creations fail us? You,

in whatever time, space, or incarnated shape you exist,

will you remember our heroes and villains?

 

Answer me this:

 

Do you still close your eyes and recite the lord’s prayer

before going into hyper sleep at near light-speed?

Have you left literal milestones of our triumphs?

Can you hear the music of the heavenly spheres?

 

What will you call star systems no man has ever seen?

Or a sky so foreign even Polaris can’t guide you?

Will you fear the impending blackness

as galaxies drift apart in an ever-expanding universe?

 

What will “Terra,” “Luna,” and “Sol” mean

to you twenty light-years away?

Have you taken poetry, art, the Popul Vuh

and the King James Bible?

Do you have an ansible or telepathy?

Has technology finally overtaken magic?

 

Are you happy?

Do you know of love and loss so great it knows no bounds?

Do you still dream in zero gravity?

Do you fear the space outside the airlock?

 

Science fiction has satisfied my thirst for your technology,

perhaps created from these very poems.

So all I want to know, all we ever want to know

facing the march of our mortal lives,

is if our progeny is still human.