LXXXII-LXXXIV

Who remembers the Man-Kzin Wars?

They set the standard for humanity as the universe’s psychopaths.

   

LXXXII.

Our youngest daughter hit age ten today;
she asked my wife to bake for her a cake.
At her request, we had Chinese buffet
with options to avoid a bellyache.

My Mother sent her gifts that she unwrapped
then after school we took the highway down.
We witnessed her attention growing rapt
as we stopped by the best bookstore in town.

We let her hunt at leisure through the shelves
collecting half a dozen weighty tomes.
We didn’t purchase any for ourselves
but helped her carry hers where’re she’d roam.

So once again she has a mighty stack
to keep her busy until we go back.


LXXXIII.

He knows and calls each star by its own name—
now there’s a thought that sticks within my head.
A trillion stellar masses, none the same,
that burn a billion years before they’re dead.

Imagine infinite attentive love
that never bores or drifts or tires out,
as though each star were all alone above,
as though its purpose never were in doubt.

Such love-and-knowledge permeates the light
and saturates each photon with its being,
a fathomless awareness burning bright
which brings to life the very thing that’s seen.

The eye of God that penetrates each star
can kindle there a spirit from afar.


At this point I took a weeklong break,

and came back with a new rhyme scheme

inspired by Christina Rosetti.


LXXXIV.

For decades Star Trek’s popular appeal
has been the dream: utopia to come.
Still, on occasion storylines succumb
to darker themes that challenge this ideal.

The Federation has quite close at hand
technologies suppressed and off the books
so that if they their morals had forsook
no enemy against Starfleet could stand.

The science fiction trope I most enjoy
is humans as a species all gone mad
with weapons no sane aliens employ.

The universe’s lone psychotic ape
is always brewing up some new doodad
of horror leaving sentient life agape.