poetry • Other Shorts
Small poems, serious and humorous, on the nature of Everything.
Borrowed forms, invented forms, more forms, and no forms; any sort of of short expression.
"Would that I knew you!"
On the pocketed plains of Oraea’s petrified forests.
the Robot gazed up at the bleached ascendant spire
shaped of wood that would not burn in fire.
“Would that I knew you in an instant.
Casually as breath.
As awakening.
Noticing.
Being.
Would that I knew you!”
~ Anonymous ancient poem found on Oraea in a Xeonexai caldera
by Hjenlyera Xet while running an excavation expedition,
unclear if it is only about a Robot or composed by one as well.
the cost of the lost
"The cost. The cost!
Yet an unknown price must and will suffice.
Every step of history shared, every rare soul and body bared,
every echo echo echo of voices, choices, noises gone gone gone,
every shadow of the lines of lives drawn from dark unto the dawn -
they're all one now under that same still-burning sun.
Nothing has path or power there - no being, no device.
For now, an unknown price must and will suffice.
But oh the loss! The lost!"
~ by Nickel Carnelian (legend-in-self-exile)
This poem can be found on the planet khoyyohk, at one of the many entrances to the ancient and ruined metropolis called Almun-kho. Considering the more ‘baroque’ notes in this poem's energy and language, it is believed to be from earlier in Nickel's compositional career. It tells us that he has visited khoyyohk, yes, but it also reveals something of his character to know that he was moved enough to write both this and the other poems of his we've found there. The idea that he spent an unknown amount of time (as it were) on khoyyohk also means that certain ideas and realities about his life suddenly become possible, when we might never have considered them before…
These words were composed in response to the palpable presence of an absence left in an ancient cataclysm's wake. When that cataclysm came, a dispersed and diverse community of esoteric lineage was altogether lost, with all of their threads of deep history and vast mystery gone along with them. Everything that had pooled into their care, their awareness, their capacity to share - gone, gone, gone.