By gate obscured
As well as blocked
While I
Outside
Peer through the gaps
At what I could never have
While those
Inside
Lead a life
Purposefully removed
From the gate’s other side
While I
Outside
Peer through the gaps
At what I could never have
While those
Inside
Lead a life
Purposefully removed
From the gate’s other side
Unmoved by the tides
Steadfast in the currents
An oasis of calm in the tumult
The waves break upon me
Then slide back to the ocean
Their energy dissipated
Until the sea itself
Is becalmed
Take a breath, my son
Take a breath
Sit with the present
What you fear
Is already past
Or has not come
That is all your dour spelunking
Will ever find
So long as you believe
The depths are darkness
Be not your mind
But mindful
Open your heart
For in its depths
Is always light
I leave the depths unplumbed
Take a breath
Quiet my mind
And from the depths rises
The light that is love
How disturbingly dark and broken
Some of these worlds are
How maliciously cruel
And though I know such worlds exist
In their hearts and in their deeds
I know I have never set foot in such a world
Also, my apologies for the lateness of this week’s challenge. I had to work today, and then this much prose takes much longer to pen than a poem. 😉
The situational awareness of a Series 25 is pretty hard for a mere human to wrap their head around. While these battle droids are equipped with a pair of excellent optical sensors, positioned to replicate the appearance of a predator’s stereo vision, it is their internal sensors which provide the bulk of their operational data. These include radar (both atmospheric and ground-penetrating), with full sonic and electro-magnetic spectrum arrays. Their entire body acts as an antenna, collecting sensory data in a sphere up to a one kilometer radius. The Quantum Processing Unit parses and analyzes this data in real-time, determining all relevant threats in the sensory sphere and developing ongoing action plans for eliminating them.
I talked with a droid designer once who said there was really no way of putting an upper-limit on how fast a 25 can assess and respond to every situational detail of a battle in terms I could understand. “But,” she said, “if you can imagine beating Bobby Fisher at chess one hundred million times in a nanosecond while simultaneously playing every instrument for a full orchestra’s rendition of the William Tell Overture, you’ll have an inkling.”
Step back
Allow details
To live and flow
Breathes the rhythm
Breathes the rhyme
In the subtler play
Of space and time