I write to you beneath a date
that I have taken from – at last – another people
now some time gone.
This landscape is a waste, but once spawned cities.
And I have proof beneath the sand:
a chamberful of ghosts they left for us.
I write to you, who will be interested.
§
The building is impressive: underground
the vault is sealed in lead and seems secure
from earthquake and explosion; it looks set
to stay long as there’s planet round it.
There are even signs of a pyramid’s base;
a ragged granite ‘X marks the spot’.
On the archive’s door in seventeen scripts
a message is graven deep in steel plate.
We have translated it: No man shall open
the Time Vault until — and then a date.
We entered. No way to tell their years
and days, nor how they reckoned them.
§
It is almost childish, their intense belief
in a future beyond their own; as if
they had seen History, towering above them.
Their History was a god that judged as they did, harshly.
They make this suit to it.
Presumptuous maybe, but there you are,
books, films, and my days spent like a dumb father
hearing tales out of school.
It is an irony that these reports
will be forgotten, probably misfiled.
We don’t like stories much
and treat our own no more respectfully.
Eleven years between the stars:
we came here slowly, feeding richly on our time.
§
… they knew the blessing of the sun
but used it ill. Their words are full
of terror at its brightness, how it might
yet burn inside their cities …
§
This day I write I have unlocked
the secrets of their years. Prometheus
was prophesied three thousand years
before them. Their prophecy stood on the door,
a thousand years ahead.
I told you how we opened it last week.
It had been sealed three years before.
§
Their single moon is up tonight, throws shadows
even in these shining dunes. I sit here
writing, and look back upon my patient
years spent sifting through the stars for life.
Both fingers cramp against the pen.
Now who will tell me what it’s like with four?
I throw my arms above my head
as if I could call down, take back
from all the rambling skies the length
of my circuitous journey.
The fused and glassy sand
throws back a twisted image of them
broken by the knowledge of these last
three years, too short, all gone.