From the Esplanade; The Futurist
From the Esplanade
When, in the morning remnant of the moon,
the restless city stirs beneath the stars,
its buildings hunching in a black tableau
that forms Prometheus from common themes
of steel and glass and brick, I walk abroad—
for an hour now—while night lays claim on time
for the first time for me tonight (and now
already it surrenders to the sun!)—
I walk abroad requiring only love;
that it may be a morning gift unwrapt
from this dark shapeless parcel and received
in utter nakedness; that it be light!
But more than having light, I want to be
one for whom light adventures into change,
allowing for my lustings after it
and gives me place to say in certain praise:
O Light, allow me several such days!
The Futurist
And then we must replace you, Death, for you must go
with the combustion engine down the tube of time
and all will laugh at you as they do now at blimps
and bleeding, flapping wooden wings for flight and leeches
on the back for purifying blood, for in the future, Death,
hiatus will replace you, the storage called cryonics,
the deep freeze, or some such method to define
and discipline ourselves, to give a shape to time
and render meaningful our lives as you do now,
O wisdom-wasting Death, when life is lived poetically,
in many stanzas, each building on the last, developing
its theme, so that an open-sequence poem of life
is lived and not a golden drop of honey-wisdom wasted
that cost us generation after generation,
O Future, in long darkness climbing into you.