Category Archives: Robin Helweg-Larsen

SF Poem: RHL, ‘Out Of Many…’

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Two hundred million sperm
in one ejaculation;
and we are standing firm
and spouting with elation,
though but a single germ
survives to incarnation.

And much in nature throws
vast clouds into the ocean,
where myriad embryos
become a magic potion
consumed by all that goes
with food its only notion;

yet one or two survive
to adulthood and, later,
will make the species thrive
and serve up like a waiter
new young crowds that arrive
like cargo crammed on freighter.

This is how nature lives;
we should not think it foolish
eight billion of us gives
but forty fierce and mulish
posthuman narratives,
godlike as much as ghoulish,

in retrospect appearing nature’s plan
for how we cross to Nietzsche’s Superman.

*****

This poem was originally published in the Amsterdam Quarterly, although without the final couplet. I usually allow editors to make changes if they suggest them, and often the changes are an improvement that I retain. But in this case I’m afraid the science fiction speculation may be lost without those last lines: the idea that the present billions of us are on the point of being superseded by the first handful among us who achieve a godlike state of posthumanity… and that this ratio of 200,000,000 seeds being sacrificed to achieve one mature adult in the next generation is not unusual in nature.

Photo: “Stinging nettle stem with +/-15 billion seeds” by esagor is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

RHL, ‘The Sun is Always Setting’

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The sun is always setting, always setting on your day;
you sense the dark approaching, wish that it would stay away.
Do you want a life unchanging? Wish to still be a newborn?
Don’t you know life’s not a rosebud, but has root and leaf and thorn?

The sun is always setting and the black drapes are unfurled;
but notice that the sun sets on your world, not on the world:
it’s rolling into brightness in another’s happy land,
and the dark is evanescent and the brightening is grand.

The sun is always setting on the dinosaurs, but birds
are flocking into being, as are Serengeti herds;
and the sun that lights humanity? Of course it’s going to set,
and elsewhere light new tales of which we’ll just be a vignette.

The sun is always setting, but that view is just your choice;
I say the world is turning and evolving; I rejoice.

*****

Sometimes I’m told that my poetry is too bleak. But I think that’s only so if you want everything to stay as it is now. If, on the other hand, you expect change, and that change will ultimately provide more benefit than loss to the universe as a whole, then <shrug>… so it goes.

This poem has 14 lines but is hardly a sonnet. It was recently published in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal. Thanks, David Stephenson!

Photo: “Sunset Sadness” by BaboMike is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Using form: alliteration: RHL, ‘How Brashly Brave’

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How brashly brave, embroiled in this brief life,
we chance our challenge to the unchanging gods!
Strike poses, strut the strident stage of strife,
take optimistic oaths against all odds.

Fearless of foes, false friends, futility,
we wrack our reason to reach, undestroyed—
though usually of no utility—
a burst of brightness bettering the void.

*****

Although I prefer to maintain an unobtrusive persona myself, I subscribe to this philosophy of bravado existentialism. The florid alliteration suits the message.

This poem is published in the current issue of Light – thanks, Melissa Balmain and all.

Photo: “Flamboyant Emperor of the United States” by PeterThoeny is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Using form: SF sonnet: RHL, ‘On a Dead Spaceship’

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On a dead spaceship drifting round a star,
the trapped inhabitants are born and die.
The engineers’ broad privileges lie
in engine room and solar panel power.
The fruit and vegetables and protein co-ops
are run by farmers with genetics skills:
the products of their dirt and careful kills
help service trade between the several groups.
Others — musicians, architects — can skip
along the paths of interlinking webs.
Beyond these gated pods that the rich carve
for their own selves (but still within the ship),
in useless parts, are born the lackluck plebs.
Heard but ignored, they just hunt rats or starve.

*****

This sonnet was republished in Bewildering Stories in April 2024 – original publication had been in Star*Line five years previously. I find something very satisfying about using a formal sonnet structure to express science fiction and speculative fiction ideas – the ideas are by nature open-ended, unconstrained, and it feels good to tie them down as in a neat package with a bow on top. Topiary.

As for what political comments can be read into the poem, read away!

Photo: “Deepstar 2071 at Io” by FlyingSinger is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Ekphrastic sonnet: RHL, ‘Ghosts of Dead Parents’

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Her ashes spread on Skirrid that she loved;
and his bones buried by the Harbour bay…
Why choose views for the dead? Once in earth shoved,
dirt in the dark is all they’d see, not day,
even if they lived. And if cremated, well…
So is it for our own guilt’s absolution?
Or status, that their graves our standing tell?
Or rites for social change’s resolution?
Those who were always here are here no more –
Their alwaysness runs out when they decease,
and life will now sound different from before,
like insect shrills not heard until they cease.
Dead ghosts sleep twittering in our heads’ domed caves,
waking to fill night skies from dreams and graves.

*****

This sonnet was published by The Wee Sparrow Poetry Press as a response to their ekphrastic challenge for the illustration, a painting by Žofia Katriňáková. It was written for my parents who, although they died decades ago, are still a background to my thoughts. My father is buried by the bay of Governor’s Harbour, my mother’s ashes were scattered on Skirrid Fawr, the Welsh mountain she loved and lived within sight of in Abergavenny. And I have another short poem for them, published in the Amsterdam Quarterly:

In the night’s jam jar of my memory
my long-dead parents live as fireflies.
My thoughts of them worn by time’s emery,
their faint light still suggests where my path lies.

Is it reasonable to hope to be a firefly for your children and grandchildren?

Short poem: RHL, ‘Pithy’

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His words are witty,
with a twist.
He says they’re “pithy”;
note the lisp.

*****

This is one of my three short poems published in the current Rat’s Ass Review – thanks, Roderick Bates – where the good and the rude, the mocking and shocking, all coexist harmoniously.

Photo: “Protest signs are an ineffectual means of communicating my nuanced views on a variety of issues that cannot be reduced to a simple pithy slogan!” by duncan is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

Using form: Limericks: RHL, ‘Attitudes in the Holy Land’

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Moses says God says: (Deuteronomy 20:16-18)

God’s ruthless. Just read Deuteronomy,
believers get zero autonomy:
“You must kill all non-Jews
in this land that I choose.”
Just back then? Or still now? (Love His bonhomie!)

Luke says Jesus says: (Luke 19:27)

Christ was often less peaceful than stormy,
with disciples both pushy and swarmy;
to the rest he made plain
if they’d not have him reign:
“Bring them hither and slay them before me.”

Muhammad says God says: (Qur’an 9:5)

“Polytheists, wherever you find them,
you should ambush and capture and bind them,
and only relax
if they pray and pay tax;
elsewise kill them, and in the dust grind them.”

*****

Given that Jews, Christians and Muslims all claim to be worshipping the same god, the only God, the God of Abraham, it’s somewhat surprising how much time they spend fighting each other. But then, factions within the same religion have been known to slaughter each other. It seems to be something inherent in religions, especially monotheistic ones – if you believe there is only one god, your god, then everyone else’s belief is blasphemy.

Somehow these tribal religions of preliterate herders have continued to the present. They are so illogical and – despite beautiful architecture etc – so frequently violent that the best response I can think of is the mockery of limericks and other forms of light verse. That, and mourning the dead children, and supporting efforts to impose peace.

These limericks were first published in The HyperTexts, Michael R. Burch’s enormous anthology which includes extensive poetry about both the Holocaust and the Nakba, the Palestinian Catastrophe.

“Moses causes the Levites to kill the idolators” is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

SF Sonnet: RHL, ‘Transhuman Evolution’

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The humans crowd the riverbanks in cities
while you, would-be transhuman in your boat,
trust to your dreams and luck as on you float,
ignoring all the land’s static committees,
the buildings taller with their strident voices,
the citied banks ever more crammed and loud,
leaders and statues oversize and proud,
fixed in their views. But you see other choices.

And then there’s no more land. Only the sea.
You deso-, iso-, yet e-lated find
after the Desolation of the Years,
sailing and searching past humanity
in the vast oceans of the future mind,
a life within the music of the spheres.

*****

This sonnet has just been published in Space and Time #146, a magazine where fantasy, science fiction, horror and whatever else are presented in a variety of print, online and audio forms. The sonnet owes something to one of my favourite Matthew Arnold poems, ‘The Future‘, which begins

A wanderer is man from his birth.
He was born in a ship
On the breast of the river of time;
Brimming with wonder and joy
He spreads out his arms to the light,
Rivets his gaze on the banks of the stream.

and ends flowing out into the ocean:

As the pale waste widens around him,
As the banks fade dimmer away,
As the stars come out, and the night-wind
Brings up the stream
Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea.

I assume Matthew Arnold limited this vision to the individual life, but I see it also as an image relevant to the progress of the human species into something vaster and unknowably different – not far removed from Nietzsche’s sense of Man as being a bridge between animal and… superman, or transhuman. Not the nasty small-minded punks of Nazi and neo-Nazi superman stupidity, but something far grander in a far larger development towards what life could become.

Photo: “Millennium Dome/O2 Arena from Trinity Buoy Wharf, Blackwall” by wirewiper is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

RHL, ‘Deuteronomy 20: 16-18’

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You’ve no autonomy
under Deuteronomy;
it’s your obligation
to your tribal nation
to kill all Palestinians
so you don’t sin against
God, who’s neurotic.
Yes, Yahweh’s psychotic.
No escaping his wrath,
no path but the psychopath.

*****

For Christians and Jews who state (as Jesus did) that every reported command by God in the Torah / Old Testament must be obeyed, I ask their position on Deuteronomy 20. This contains the command for the complete genocide of the non-Jews living in the land which Moses claimed had been given to the Jews by God. (Note: not expulsion or enslavement of the people living there, but the death of all of them and their animals.) The reason? So that they don’t teach evil ways to the Jews:

16 But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:
17 But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee:
18 That they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods; so should ye sin against the Lord your God.

To the extent that fundamentalist Jews constitute a large percentage of the Israeli population and are influential in the national government, the Palestinian situation cannot be resolved until scriptural passages like this are dragged out into the open and examined and discussed: was that passage only for then, and things are different now? Or does the command to massacre non-Jews still hold for today’s Jews in “the Holy Land”?

This poem was first published in The HyperTexts, where Michael R. Burch maintains extensive collections of poetry related to both the Holocaust and the Palestinian Catastrophe.

Illustration: “Moses has the mature women and the male children of the Midianites killed” is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Short poem: RHL, ‘God – pfft!’

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All the things God could do,
all the things he doesn’t:
stop earthquakes and disease,
world war between first cousins…
Complaints at God may seem
rashly impertinent–
But so what? Life shows God
clearly omnimpotent.

*****

Not much to say about my rude little poems, except that a lot of them get published in Rat’s Ass Review, whose Spring/Summer issue has just (optimistically) been published – thanks, Roderick Bates! And also, well, I guess I was proud of the poem’s last word, though I’m definitely not the first person to think of it.

Cartoon: Matt Rosemier