Nativity

The planets moved and shifted, spat out thunderbolts of lightning,
scarring Mars and Earth in deep trenches—
pock-marking the moon that served as conductor,
absorbing the celestial fury.

Then came the wobble—
Venus surged so close, so charged,
it knocked us over,
and the seasons were never the same again.

Long winters, no winters,
scorching the green into deserts.

But we measured and tracked the sky,
and after seven hundred years or so,
there was stability.

The stars became still,
year after year.

The new sun no longer died—
three days was the limit
once we achieved this cosmic balance.

With stability came time
to shed our survival skins,
to emerge from our hardened shells
and begin recovery from the last cataclysm.

To bring forth that compartmentalized
ancestral and collective wound
from the deepest recesses—
never to speak of it,
never to remind ourselves or others
of what happened.

Such remembrance breeds depression, a fall,
can set back development
as we wallow in self-pity
instead of try try try again

We must build our second ark of survival,
a second sanctuary
where the breathing stock—the humans—
can live in matrix simulations of consciousness
when it happens again.

Or perhaps we'll build the means to travel,
to find a place just like the old home
under the old Sun.

Maybe we can even engineer it—
capture a brown dwarf,
hook up a few planets,
and use it to sail the universe again
toward the galaxy's center,
away from these outer backwaters
on the spiral arm.

When you live outside time,
it's not such a long haul.

But if you're trapped in the time zone,
it's not pleasant—
it's where the old ones
who retire are sent.

If they cannot be the muse
or inspiration for their material bodies on Earth,
to pull them up from where they are
to where we are,
so we can move up the spiral—
they might as well stay on Earth,
in the flesh prisons
where their higher-side crimes
are reflected.