Love and danger in a domed city on the Moon
Creation is a dramatic poem of eternal love and infinite space, where dreams collide painfully with reality, and yet reality is moulded by dreams.
Upon the living brink of crystal deeps
Stood the Designer with sky-challenging gaze.
A crumb of bread – he mused – a sip of wine
Vanish among ten billion trillion suns
That chime slow eons of galactic time.
What hope that ever mortal flesh and dreams
Could overcome these stark infinities?
He leads the best talents of the industrial age in a project of millennial ambition: bringing to life the dream of Tranquility – the first city of life to arise from the barren dust of the lunar seas: –
I love you, city of another world!
Child of old Earth, yet with a joie de vivre
Filled: your rabbit warrens underground;
Your golden domes that dazzle in the sun;
Your liquid opal shield of artificial skies
Embracing many an incense-bearing tree –
Machine and ecosphere in harmony.
But can this titanic city survive its encounter with an icy comet?–
A newsflash: and astronomers have spotted
Diving towards us a formerly unknown comet.
There should be a spectacular display –
A vasty scimitar unsheathed in space
As if in ghastly warning – but the experts claim
There’s no cause for alarm. The comet’s path
Will do no harm to those on Earth or Moon.
Eugene, a humble technician in the lunar metropolis, has other things on his mind: –
Scheherazade, come and dance with me!
Bring me your radiant sable face, your velvet hair,
Your two-tone hands, your caring touch, your grace,
Your laughing lighthouse-eyes . . .
His friend Alec has no doubts about whether to stay, or get out while there’s still time: –
He’s made a tidy pile, and so – goodbye,
Man never was meant to live up in the sky!
But is Alec too hasty to dismiss the noble cause of teaching the dismal dust to breathe, and planting a lunar Garden of Tranquility? Can the Designer yet save his city from catastrophe? And what has happened to the beautiful Scheherazade?
Years later, it seems as if all has been in vain: –
Where once cascading cliffs of strings and brass
Brought to life The Isle of the Dead,
Where once the Sleeping Beauty and Prince Charming danced,
Today an eerie stillness holds its breath . . .
The dreaming domes, the silent subway labyrinths,
Await their prince to reawaken with a kiss
The eternal life / death / re-birth calculus.
But in the end, tragedy is defeated by the power of the human spirit–
Shine on, you fertile midwife to the cosmos,
And demonstrate how love and courage flower:
Your children are the stars, your mother, Earth,
Your craters, wedding cups of sacred power.
Olympic city, you are built upon
The suffering of those who went before –
Your triumph is the tribute to their woe!
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Creation offers a poetic philosophy for the coming Millennium: a vision of hubris, nemesis and anastasis (re-birth) as stages in the eternal creative cycle in which mankind finds its destiny in the universe. I believe this is appropriate for a new century in which stunning new insights into our place in the universe continue to share the limelight with the wars and natural disasters which make life a misery for millions of our fellow-human beings.
Students of Russian will immediately recognise its inspiration in Pushkin’s great work Mednyj Vsadnik (The Bronze Horseman), which tells the tale of the disastrous flood of St Petersburg in 1824.
In January 2000, the author gave a public reading of this work at the Old Fire Station theatre in Oxford, U.K.
Creation is now available in booklet form, price £4.00, ISBN 0-9536158-0-4. In case of difficulty finding it, please e-mail the author on sa (at) astronist.demon.co.uk