Canto III
The tradition began there. Of those that could see the blue flame.
They came to that smooth oval surface knowing full well without words it
was of and about other worlds...what they called of the Great Spirit.
Some of them had room for knowing, so I gave them something to take away.
I had been a long time there. Reckoned in eons.
This place I kept with fused silicate and armoton metal put together under pressure
as a gas then taken to a solid without ever losing integrity as a liquid.
It could not be broached, and I might stay until called again.
The day I began the tradition Yahpuah came. Placing his hand on the glassine surface,
he asked to know how to help his people.
He would give his blood for them, even go into the strange slave bondage of a war captive.
Pleading, he described the fever upon all the children and old women.
Could he take it all upon himself?
I broke with my own. Giving him just a little of what had sat so idle all of these countless ages.
He received what he needed, and I, now a Lord Jim among savages.
My great uncle, the last of the Old World.
Knew what stood before him that day...in the cave.
It had pushed up, all the way from just above earth's mantle.
In moments, sheathed with the uplift of Tatra Mountains,
it came from where it had been placed.
Like the spire of some mammoth cathedral of glassine strength
that nothing of this earth might mar.
Wonderful engine, playing moon motion still, holding with its
others the parity to hold moon to earth...the alien moon
Taken from its Martian cradle to perform as it had there,
to bring life to one and leave death for the other.
We build...for nothing comes solely of time. Anything living
has been our nurtured.
We protect...nothing stands alone against fusion star, more
ambivalent in its wake, than earth human in his deed.
We provide the mineral, wrested from the firmament and drenched
by the sun so its substance becomes manna, promise of all life.
Among those who can compress time began Purpose.
And what vacuum must be to think so much from accidents come!
Copyright April 2001 James C. Horak
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