The Earth’s a pot of water on the range, and nothing happens for a billion years; then as the water heats, things start to change and movement – formless, unaware – appears. Next the first tiny bubbles start to form, brains self-assembling, they form, collapse, form and collapse in water barely warm, minds that start yearning for some Great Perhaps. They grow, they start to rise, still fade away while dreaming of a life that will not fail; and this is humans as we are today, starting to boil up from this mortal jail to break into the vastly bigger air… unknowing where steam goes, what happens there.
*****
This is as close to religious belief as I can get. Somewhere at the intersection of Nietzsche and Vonnegut, of reincarnation and “It’s all a simulation”, with Musk aiming for Mars and wondering aloud if he’s an NPC, is a place of absolute and unknowable change. And that’s where we are.
Like ants searching randomly across a table like water dribbling across uneven ground and pooling here, running to the side, filling and flowing to the next dip, so we have walked out of Africa for a hundred, two hundred thousand years, over the hills, around the coasts, seeking the greener grass, the next best land, glad of a tree, glad of a cave, catching the lightning for our own hearth, settling, pooling, then spilling out over the next hill, round the next headland, following bird flight, following game herds, exploring then leading then fetching our families, finding and fighting with those who were there before, killing or trading, absorbing or raping, loving, despising the different, the ogres and trolls, like a stain spreading out round the world, and walking then running up as though to take a free kick, walking then running up as though to bowl, walking then running as along a diving board to bounce once, twice in the air and launch into space… Here comes, there goes the human race.
I wrote this piece as a long rambling exploratory sentence which picks up speed and purpose towards the end and a concluding rhyme. This (not exactly formal) poem was first published in Bewildering Stories a few years ago.
The exoplanet Wasp in Pisces Subsists despite unending crises: It’s hard to keep an even keel At near the melting-point of steel, And even heroes’ hearts might cower With winds 10,000 miles per hour. The place can furthermore rely on Incessant rain of molten iron. All this might serve as a directive To keep our problems in perspective.
*****
Editor’s note: Inspired by a story in The Guardian, “Scientists identify rain of molten iron on distant exoplanet. Conditions on Wasp-76b in Pisces include temperatures of 2,400C and 10,000mph winds”, this poem by Julia Griffin ran in Light’s Poems of the Week on 16 March 2020. It was reprinted in the Potcake Chapbook ‘Robots and Rockets‘.
Julia Griffin lives in south-east Georgia/ south-east England. She has published in Light, LUPO, Mezzo Cammin, and some other places, though Poetry and The New Yorker indicate that they would rather publish Marcus Bales than her. Much more of her poetry can be found through this link in Light.
The purity of space Is like an egg, a young child’s face, Unsullied piece of paper’s grace; And, as the child must age and wizen, As paper’s made for thought’s expression, The egg to break and unimprison, So space was made for human decompression.
Keeping with our recent theme of SF poetry, this is one of mine first published in Bewildering Stories #740.
The hyperspace viewer shows a flowing plane of treebark, roots; a distorted approximation of what we aren’t permitted to see. Clearing again with each rugose transformation, limited by the speed of post-quantum rendering, the map of our passage grows: an icebound dimensional lake thaws, remembering the hot pulse of its creation, shows palpable vestiges of times, energies and matters through which our wake will trace. The reflection of our ship shimmers, spatters light back to streaming stars. We race onward, out to where no atmospheres and skies of planets can frustrate our vision; the provocation of empty black where no suns rise unbearable without acquisition. Particular silence surrounds us like a felt of absence, itself the sinuous, tentacular touch of a void-god whose cult is abstinence, who meditates on dark too much— those distances between the stars and galaxies— and has a singular affection for black holes and cosmic fallacies.… Sometimes we overreach. Each direction (up? down? sideways?) seems different now; our ship’s brain’s blocked—no ability to calculate location. We tell it to go back: how— why these results? We’ve lost mobility, it says; the only options are charm and strange. We clear its cache, then re-install the route. On the viewscreen, no known space in range; nothing but the false stars of snow. About fifty-six hours in, the background gigahertz hiss of relic radiation is finally broken: our A.I. transmits a mad-dog growl. Something’s amiss. What does it mean? Unspoken fears flicker on our faces like shadows cast by entities we feel but cannot see, leaving invisible tracks across the vast cosmic chasm, preceding one more tangibly manifesting. A small silver embryo afloat in amnion of atrament, our ship is dwarfed by tentacles of terror. We’re but a mote in the eye of a demonic god, a blip cascading down through superimposed dimensions to our doom, where something pines beyond a threshold, longs to enter our attention— and hungers for the taste of human minds. Our Earth’s a pale blue memory, a ripe prize to harvest; our civilization will revert to a predawn whence no human can ever rise. The God Void sits in judgment—but won’t convert one soul. Its vastness grows, membranous and bloody, slithers back into the open portal of a queer dwelling where it withdraws to sleep and let the muddy waters of vacuum clear.
F. J. Bergmann writes: ” ‘Further’ first appeared in the Lovecraft eZine. I selected ‘Further’ because I’m fond of cosmic horror, and I was pleased with being able to maintain the form and narrative at this length. The process I used for this poem is what I call ‘transmogrification’: starting with a text source, which can be anything, from another poem to spam, I write a different poem or story using most or all of the words from the source, generally in reverse order. The source for this poem was ‘Let Muddy Water Sit and It Grows Clear,’ a considerably shorter nature poem by Ted Mathys, whose title is reflected in the last two lines of my poem.”
F. J. Bergmann is the poetry editor of Mobius: The Journal of Social Change (mobiusmagazine.com), past editor of Star*Line, the journal of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association (sfpoetry.com), managing editor of MadHat Press (madhat-press.com), poetry editor for Weird House Press (weirdhousepress.com), and freelances as a copy editor and book designer. She lives in Wisconsin with a husband, intermittent daughters and a horse or two, and imagines tragedies on or near exoplanets. Her writing awards include SFPA Rhysling Awards for both long and short poems and SFPA Elgin Awards for two recent chapbooks: Out of the Black Forest (Centennial Press, 2012), a collection of conflated fairy tales, and A Catalogue of the Further Suns, first-contact reports from interstellar expeditions, winner of the 2017 Gold Line Press manuscript competition. She was a 2019 quarter-winner for Writers of the Future. Venues where her poems have appeared include Asimov’s SF, Missouri Review, Polu Texni, Spectral Realms and Vastarien; her speculative fiction has been published in Abyss & Apex, Little Blue Marble (CA), Pulp Literature (CA), Soft Cartel, WriteAhead/The Future Looms (UK), and elsewhere. She has competed at National Poetry Slam with the Madison Urban Spoken Word slam team. While she has no academic literary qualifications,. she is kind to those so encumbered. In a past life, she worked with horses. She thinks imagination can compensate for anything.
After a billion years of larval hit-and-miss humans emerged, stood up, and fed, and grew, started to build their city chrysalis from which, 3,000 years entombed, now formed anew, they burst in wild bright flight with wings deployed out to the stars. The egg case of this final birth, the Earth, was, naturally, destroyed.
We have good news and bad news. The bad news is that the rate of change is ever-increasing in all aspects of human life–from our bodies to our planet–and we will never return to the old normal. The good news is that this is the process by which life advantages to higher levels of organisation and intelligence.
This poem was originally published in Star*Line, one of the two magazines of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association (SFPA). The other magazine is Eye to the Telescope (ETTT).
The poem rhymes and is written in iambics; but the rhymes are not structured to a pattern, and the lines are of uneven length. This casual form is used by Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot among others, in some of my favourite poems such asA Summer Night (I have always loved the three paragraphs beginning with:
For most men in a brazen prison live, Where, in the sun’s hot eye, With heads bent o’er their toil, they languidly Their lives to some unmeaning taskwork give, Dreaming of naught beyond their prison wall.)
and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. The form doesn’t have the musicality of more regular forms like the sonnet or limerick, but it provides all the memorising strength of rhythm and rhyme within a more conversational flow, and facilitates different lengths of thought including, if wanted, a punchline.
We live in difficult times, what with the unprecedented challenges of climate change, mass migration, infectious diseases, unpredictable technological advances in weaponry, and more. And the problems will continue to multiply and get larger, even as we develop solutions to the smaller, simpler ones. And from the inevitable destruction of our form of life will emerge… what? We cannot know, we probably cannot even imagine.
When the AI hit, Diamandis, Thiel,
Branson, Page, Brin, some Russians and Chinese
became the gods of Earth, of skies and seas,
by grappling it to themselves with hoops of steel;
appeared as giants, credit cards, or scotch
to screw with mortals, rape them just for play;
fought, and destroyed the Earth, blasted away…
taking along, as fleas on arms, legs, crotch,
musician, writer, politician, whore,
derelict, linguist, murderer, the insane…
some samples of the human heart and brain
as being interesting distractions for
the gaps of interstellar time and space.
Aspire to fleadom, folks, or leave no trace.
This sonnet was originally published in Snakeskin a couple of years ago. Like the previous sonnet I put up here, it reflects my concerns about the near future. The list of people who might take advantage of the possibilities offered by the ongoing revolutions in genetics, robotics, A.I. and Nanotechnology should today include Elon Musk–but the candidates for practical godhood change every few years.
And what the vast majority of left-behind humans can do about it is anyone’s guess.
I, Robin, being of sound mind, declare
the Cryonics Institute shall have my corpse.
That’s where I’ll rest, if I can get shipped there,
no matter how friends stare, family gawps.
“I”, “corpse” and “rest” are contradictory, true,
because we’re into science frontier realms
where problem-solving causes problems anew,
where human thought both helps and overwhelms.
Limitless lifespan, or apocalypse?
Both feasible as we reach out through space.
Cryonics is a ticket for both trips…
or none at all, if humans lose our race.
Enjoy this puzzle-path, solve it and thrive.
Drive to arrive alive. Strive to survive.
Another of my existential sonnets, this one just published in Star*Line, the quarterly publication of SFPA, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association, now in its 43rd year. Star*Line is one of those tolerant poetry magazines which will publish anything that appeals to editor Vince Gotera, from formal verse to experimental poetry–so long as it deals with space ships or time travel, dragons or golems and so on, of course.
Technically this is a Shakespearean sonnet, i.e. it’s in iambic pentameter and rhymes ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Each of the 4-line blocks is a complete thought, describing the existential situation being faced. There is a volta or turn (but it’s weak) before the final couplet which moves from description to prescription: the couplet is a call to action.
By the way, I am changing the poem’s title with this blog post–it appears in Star*Line with the first line as the title.
The Earth’s explored, and flat. And I know this
despite Earth’s shadow in lunar eclipse,
and how horizons hide the hulls of ships.
We’ve reached Earth’s edge, stare into the abyss
with Branson, Musk, NASA and the Chinese,
toppling into blackness, falling prey
with Kurzweil, CRISPR, Google, Bostrom, de Grey,
businesslike scientists battling disease,
entrepreneurs with dark unearthly schemes:
the outer darkness space’s endlessness,
the inner darkness immortality.
Pushing and leaning into stellar space,
the event horizon of our thoughts and dreams,
the black hole of our post-humanity.
Published in the Formal & Rhyming Poetry section of this month’s Better Than Starbucks, the “Earth’s edge” idea is just another way of trying to express my ongoing fascination with the end of humanity-as-we-know-it, and the beginning of something that we can’t even visualize yet, let alone make confident predictions about. Close to the idea of the “posthuman god” at the bottom of the Wikipedia page.
Technically, this is a poorly-structured sonnet (ABBA CDDC EFG FEG), with a really weak rhyme of endlessness / space. Sorry about that. But I hope you can enjoy it for the ideas, anyway!
Form in Formless Times 