Planets wait darkly for the selective seed
A poem
Planets wait darkly for the selective seed,
sown secretly, without fanfare.
Once on a wayward world far out on the galactic rim,
away from the centre of things, unnoticed,
as if by whim, there came a stir of breath.
Now habitable zones of clamouring suns
excite the observatory.
A harvest of discoveries, astronomers enthuse,
a cosmic crop cultivated by the stars
to make mere news on populated Earth.
It took us four billion years to find a home
and ponder on a spectrograph,
yet so lightly do we take the generous loan of life
and, forgetting the privilege of the seed,
choose for strife, and think ourselves to ruin.
What if, then, amid the planetary haul,
life climbs to its giddy zenith?
Won’t new eyes gaze upon a dying world that watched theirs born,
An exo-planet that was once clothed with life,
glad worn at first but worn away in time?
From my book A Raft of Dreams: Stories and Poems by Geoff Ward (2015)
