Death will be harsher now, as, year by year,
we solve the clues of immortality:
emotions sink to animality
as false hopes tighten screws of desperate fear.
Hormone control will make age disappear—
after false starts, most horrible to see—
but those already old must beg to be
frozen for the genetic engineer.
While war, starvation, pipe Earth’s gruesome jigs,
successful businessmen will fight to gain
some dead teen’s body, to transplant their brain,
the already-old beg to be guinea-pigs.
Children, look back, hear our despairing cry:
we bred immortals, but we had to die!

*****

I wrote this poem on 3 January 1982 – twenty years before I began to get poems published. (Formal verse was an almost absolute no-no in late 20th century magazines… although consistently taught and highly praised in schools and universities, of course.) It was finally published in Ambit in October 2007 – the magazine started and managed for 50 years by Martin Bax and the stomping ground of J.G. Ballard, Ralph Steadman, Carol Ann Duffy, etc.

In April 2018 the poem was reprinted in Bewildering Stories, an online weekly headquartered in Guelph, Ontario; and in 2024 I accepted Maryann Corbett‘s suggestion to change the title and first line and instead of “harder” use the word “harsher”… the earlier word incorrectly suggesting that we might be finding it more difficult to achieve death.

The ideas behind the poem were not new to science fiction, but were less common in formal verse. The ideas continue to inch their way towards reality; continue to be explored in popular culture (Piraro, Futurama…); and in the last 44 years I have continued to explore SF and existential themes in verse.

Cartoon: “piraro brain transplant” by Dreaming in the deep south is licensed under CC BY 2.0.