Written by: Oliver Pan
Graphic Design : Shantanu Das
our sun’s hydrogen reserves fused through,
the star-turned-red-giant bloating
as do our corpses — you will require flames.
Between the solar shock wave and Earth’s
rattling — an opaque interval — you must
stare, but we people prior will have left
no crude fluid for ignition, for light,
having tapped this rock to gorge
our bellies to petroleum ache.
Perhaps you will have evolved — blood
supplemented with Edison and Tesla’s
currents, half your body fed by generators
that slow-cure your biomass or waste.
Maybe you will be self-luminous.
But if you are still — like we,
like me — a mere meat-pod fated to watch
Mercury and Venus engulfed, surely
you hold designs for an interplanetary ark.
Anticipate humanity’s years spent
adrift in the dark liquor of space — lost
within hibernation and missing mother-
planet, further estranged from all revelation of how we came to be. From this unproven vantage point (inside
our history with no solid alpha), I claim to pity
your inherited task — to catalog the last
telluric pulse, close the case of man as now
known. But beneath my softened hide,
I’m envious. All of our missteps as shepherds,
all the graffiti eclipsing our souls, all of it
will cinder and you will view this erasure
from your Mars-bound barge. You will know the phenomenon that is judgment, see it real-time
as prophets allegedly witnessed. Man will never
have beheld a clearer beacon to be reborn.
