Poem: Space Dreams
A bleak little piece from that blink-and-you-missed-it heartbeat between 9/11 and Iraq. I was browsing 'space art' from the 1960s and reflecting on how the dream of the Space Age had turned to be illusion. Even Stanley Kubrick missed it; the artists' visions then were all about how we'd cope as humans with massive mega-engineering projects in space, not on how there'd be struggles to keep 30-year-old technology flying.
The phrase 'grieved for falling shards' seems ominous in retrospect, as if this were a pre-requiem for Columbia. There were no manned US disasters in orbit before 2003, so why did the word 'grief' come to mind? I think I was thinking of Skylab and Apollo 13. But this makes a pair with 'Angel Falling', though it wasn't intended that way.
we had such visions then
sketched water-colour shapes
of star utopias
and one small pale blue world
the sky was not enough
to hold our upturned gaze
we counted satellites
and grieved for falling shards
the night was rich and blue
it seemed we had grown wings
and godlike strummed the dawn
to touch all things with grace
it broke, that fevered sweat
in which we were alive
into the quiet dark
we fell with no complaint
and now the moon is high
on concrete and on crime
it shines with cold delight
and calls our future, blood