Poetry
Icarus
Skimming clouds
Endlessly, beautifully alien
After close clay walls.
Beat, flex, beat again;
Ascending, subduing the very sky.
A Colossus in the empty landscape,
He exceeds monster, city, or god.
But not time -
Never time.
Gently it drips away, stealing hubris,
ageing youth, fading memory.
And although Promethean wax can easily be smoothed and reshaped,
One thing (and one thing alone) is timeless:
Pride will always come before the fall.
Droid's Eye View of the Grid
We drift,
Obsolete and forgotten,
Waiting for the end of the world.
Winking, flashing, pulsing,
It writhes under the fug of its own industry.
Inexorable consumption: as we watch, it erases the last of the scrubland,
Forced to a stop by the sea.
In the next district, the land has long since been blanketed -
Shortly (we know that a couple of minutes is no longer considered so, but please indulge us)
A solution will be found to the water problem as well.
And if this district should survive the next blitz,
The solution will be disseminated.
In a few hours (B-593,762s allowing),
The entire earthy, wet planet will be coated.
But regardless of whether our neighbour becomes a quickly-reclaimed patch of ground in the near future,
(It has, after all, been allowed to exist an awfully long time - perhaps even a decade and a half)
Another district, in another place, will create the solution instead.
Witness the triumph of the interminable, frenzied human Race.