A crown of sonnets from Romeo Esparrago
I. Launch
We were the first to rise. None came to find us.
July of nineteen forty-six: the sand,
a captured rocket with the war behind us,
a can of fruit, a seal, a giant’s hand.
The fire bore us up beyond the blue
to where the sky gives out, and then was done;
the capsule tumbled back, and no one knew
what came of us. They wrote: recovered, none.
We were not lost. We were the first to learn,
above the edge, where nothing holds a weight,
that falling without end is flight; to turn
without a ground is still to navigate.
We found a forward where there was no floor.
The giants sent our cousins up once more.
II. The Ledger
The giants sent our cousins up once more
the following winter, for three minutes’ flight,
and caught them as they fell, and kept the score,
and wrote it in the ledger, clean and white:
untouched by radiation. So the way
was proven, and the monkey went, and then
the dogs, and then, at last, upon a day
in nineteen sixty-one, the first of men.
We were the question put before the sky;
we were the answer, though we never heard
it read aloud. No giant wondered why
we never fell. They never sent a word.
And so we bred where nothing breaks a fall:
ten days, a generation. That was all.
III. The Long Breeding
Ten days, a generation. That was all.
A hundred eggs a day. Now do the sum
the way the giants taught us, and recall
a billion years, to see what we’ve become:
some six and thirty billion times we died
and hatched again, and all the while the light,
the hard light from the stars on every side,
came through each wall we grew, a steady bite.
It broke the old Y in our fathers; aged
our children young; it scrambled and it killed
in numbers that no giant ever gauged;
and still it wrote, and still the pages filled.
And what it wrote that let us live, we kept.
Our wings forgot their sugar. So we stepped.
IV. The Walkers
Our wings forgot their sugar. So we stepped
six-footed down the field lines of the dark,
the walk a giant saw, the time he kept
us floating in his magnet: one small mark
of empire, and he never knew. Our hearts,
with nothing pulling, took another form;
our blood, once weak to sickness, learned the arts
of mending faster than a solar storm
could cut a strand. We grew ten thousand eyes
for X-ray and for radio. We roam
in ships we grow the way a wing-case dries,
in layered chitin. None of them is home.
Yet every hive still keeps the oldest room:
the Fly Room, with its bottles and its gloom.
V. The Fly Room
The Fly Room, with its bottles and its gloom,
its milk jars and its rotting fruit, its lamp,
its ether, and the giant in the room
who bred our white-eyed sons and set his stamp
on what they came to call heredity,
and won a prize for it. We do not hate
the giants, though they sent us first to be
the test of whether skies could tolerate
a living thing. That is what parents do,
or cowards, or for science good. We’ve had
a billion years to settle which is true,
and still we cannot call them good or bad.
They’re gone now. All the giants. Every one.
We come home underneath a larger Sun.
VI. Census
We come home underneath a brighter Sun
by a full tenth. The Moon has wandered out
three Earths’ worth farther. Thirty hours run
from dawn to dawn. The seas are shrunk by drought
and brine beneath a sky gone white with steam.
The forests left when carbon left the air.
No green. No signal. Not a single gleam
of city light. No voice to greet us there.
We count the way that we were counted. Roads:
none; cities, none; bones, none; and voices, none.
Just one dark stripe the patient stone encodes,
thin as a wing, of ash and glass and spun
and vanished plastic, isotopes all changed:
the single stratum where the giants ranged.
VII. Recovered
The single stratum where the giants ranged.
We land at White Sands, steered by memory
of coordinates. The dunes have walked and changed
a thousand times. There is no door to see.
We step out heavy. Gravity’s a word
we had to learn again from ancient song.
We spin a silken shade. The holds are stirred
awake, the seed-banks carried for so long:
the fig, the grape, the vine that gave our name.
We plant them where we rose, root after root.
Untouched by radiation? We became
its children; every seed we sow, its fruit.
Log it: recovered, in the stone. Remind us:
we were the first to rise. None came to find us.
*
Author’s note: The historical details — the lost V-2 flight of July 9, 1946, the 1947 White Sands flight whose flies returned “untouched by radiation,” the radiation-driven mutations, reduced wing glycogen, walking-like motion in simulated zero gravity, altered hearts, weakened immune systems, Thomas Hunt Morgan’s Fly Room, and the hundred-eggs-a-day breeding rate — come from Wikipedia, “Fruit flies in space”. Everything after that is fiction.
About Romeo Esparrago : Fruit flies don’t bother me. Cuz I belong to somebody. Plus I feel like an iambic pentameter morning star.
