Life perseveres
Thrives
In a desert of salt and sand
The hands and minds
Of those who battle
Time and the elements
Might heed
The supple tenacity
Of adaptation
Or their deeds
Will surely
Perish
Life perseveres
Thrives
In a desert of salt and sand
The hands and minds
Of those who battle
Time and the elements
Might heed
The supple tenacity
Of adaptation
Or their deeds
Will surely
Perish
Once the light entered the bowl
Something magical happened
Something I’ll probably
Never fully understand
The light coalesced
Hardened
Formed swirling tendrils
Of incandescence
Well
I understood one thing
Light was alive
No
Not alive
Conscious
And what I was witnessing
Was the comingling
Of unmanifested being
One each to a tendril
Swimming as if a school of fish
In a golden bowl
Struck just the right way
By the sun
And then it was gone
Light
Was merely light
Again
But some trick of the cosmic tail
Had let me in on the secret
Because in an instant
I’d known
Light
Is love
And love
Is light
When we are unmanifested
In this purest spirit form
We know this as surely as
The necessity of a breath
We know it in a way
A brain cannot grok
But our manifest purpose
The meaning of our existence
Is to remember
And for a moment
Looking into a sunlit bowl
I remembered
A glimpse of the unknowable
Out of the corner of my eye
A memory I struggle to keep
Every day
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.”
Sometimes I squint
To smudge the world
Within my mind
Then paint upon
The softened scene
A different
Kind of magic
Life renews
Thus even deepest blues
Transform
Become such vibrant hues
Reborn
As hope to those awakening
A beautiful blur
For which clarity
Is not always
An improvement
But that is plenty bright enough
There is a place
I want to be
Or fled in fear
I’m not sure which
Until I breach
And clamber through
Then come to know
Beyond the fence