Member Poem

At dawn we sang on planet Plu
a song the cosmos deemed taboo
as cobalt blue gave way to pink
and a finch-bat blinked a sleepy blink,
suspended in upended slumber.

While vole-grouse rushed in boundless number
to unlit holes in sunlit hills
and all the owl-whippoorwills
broke off their chorus round the planet,
we crooned a tune — and war began. It

floated like a bloated moon
one afternoon, a bronze balloon
that, as we watched it, detonated.

(We should have been annihilated;
instead, their malice made us chortle
thanks to the fact that we’re immortal.)

Then when the sky cleared up at last,
we blessed those brutes that brought the blast.
They left us then to sing in peace
what they well knew would never cease.

Yet these days others come — with missile,
musket, laser-gun — yell, “This’ll
teach you crackpots not to chant
such sacrilege. You shan’t! You shan’t!”
They come and leave us, leave us vexed
and, being vexed, we holler, “Next!”

And every dawn, as cobalt blue
turns pink, all animated Plu
trills out a dulcet, silvery song
the cosmos deems profoundly wrong.

*
(Appeared in The Kleksograph.)