Reaching for the sky,
Their hands hit the ceiling,
Scraping the skin of their knuckles,
The pain makes them withdraw.
Their hands come down to hide under arms,
They go down on their knees,
To bury their heads in the sand.
'I don't know' better than being wrong.
We hold aloft a light,
Raise it up into the rafters,
Let it shine on defeated faces,
Cast its glow for weary eyes to see.
Slowly they rise.
So very slowly, rise to their feet,
Standing tall they reach for the sky,
And they cast the roof aside.
I remember when space was the final
frontier,
But then we got there and now there is here,
We ran to the future and reached for the
sky,
Our goals they were lofty, our ambitions
high.
With rockets and satellites we challenged
the gods,
The heavens we would conquer, against all
the odds.
But our universe was smaller than we knew,
The vastness of space not for I or for you,
The truth may be out there but we never
will.
Like Sisyphus striving all day up the hill,
We rail against lightspeed which forces us
down,
Relativity chains us to our cosmological
small town.
They tell me we’ll never even colonise Mars,
Let alone find our way to explore distant
stars.
See, the faster you go, the longer it takes,
Seems weird, I know, but I guess them’s the
breaks.
It’s not space that’s the barrier, but time
we must beat,
And the warping of space-time we must aim to
defeat,
If we want to escape from our little place,
To explore the expanses of infinite space.
I remember when space was the final
frontier,
But then we got there and now there is here.
Two paths stretch before us, and now we must
find,
A route through closed time or through
infinite mind,
Will science find a way to defy its own
laws,
Or must we just dream…
…or go and watch Star Wars.
There were no cats on Noah's Ark,
When other beasts took flight,
The cats just purred and washed their fur,
And said: "We'll be alright."
Noah went to the oldest cat,
And said: "You'll all be killed!"
"Fear not for us," the cat replied,
"On the quantum wave function we shall ride,
"Out of sight, we're uncannily skilled."
"When floods are done and the water gone,
"And your Ark seeks a foreign shore,
"You may believe we all are dead,
"But you'll never be quite sure."
"Uncertainty's a powerful friend,
"If ever there's a doubt;
"The teeniest, tiniest, slightest hope,
"The cats will find it out."
Noah wept for what would be lost,
As he went back to his boat,
For though the waters would bear the Ark,
Cats, alas, do not float.
For forty days and forty nights,
All land was out of reach,
But when the world began to dry,
The eldest cat, with head held high,
Sat waiting on the beach.
So when this watery tale is told,
And they curse a blackbird craven,
Think to yourself, with all those cats,
What fate befell the raven?
On Monday I lost a friend.
An argument over something small
And three years were forgotten.
Three years of laughter,
Three hard, stupid words,
And we were strangers again.
On Wednesday I knew loneliness.
Afraid even to walk where we
Had run when we were friends.
Two friends apart,
Two days alone,
And my heart is breaking.
On Friday it was over.
I told my friend that I was sorry,
Although I had forgotten
What I was sorry for.
One word from me,
One word from her,
And we are friends again.