On Death

Each one will die, and yet together
Mankind will surely live forever.
Though you and I will surely die,
Mankind will soon take wing and fly,
Throughout the void, the galaxy;
There’ll be no end to you and me.
Our never-ending future shall
Make every one an immortal.
So we may face our single fate,
And know that we will live on yet.

We made a compact, time gone past –
The world would end, but we would last.
The earth goes round the sun, we’d say,
And sure its orbit must decay,
And God we banished from the scene,
Forbade to ever intervene,
And doomed we were, devoid of hope,
But yet we found a way to cope:
We would expand beyond all measure,
And bury fear in digging treasure.

The active life had found our zeal;
The world of thoughts seemed not so real.
Around the future we would bend

The vision of our lurking end.
The prospect of controlling fate
Our great intoxicate.
The present wrenched from out its frame,
Unthinking doers we became.
Our fatal future we allow
By living in eternal now.

This compact that obtains these days
Serves us heaven in three ways.
The first is simple procreation,
The future then will be our nation;
Our purpose, biologically,
Extended to eternity;
And we look on our young and think,
In the chain to ever-after, we’ve our link.
An endless future’s such fertile sod,
We sprinkle seed, and feel like God.

And next there is celebrity,
A personal immortality.
With now eternal, fleeting fame,
The record of all time became;
So the attention of our peers —
The verdict of a billion years;
To play oneself on the eternal stage,
The moving passion of the age.
Pursued by all, and won by few,
They who do not have it, live through them that do.

Lastly there’s the modern dream,
That all fall under Progress’s scheme.
Ever since Aristotle’s eviction,
Science has been science fiction.
We’d land the moon, and fly the stars,
And build Jerusalem on Mars;
Each illness cured, each sin transcended,
The frailty of life quite ended.
And thinking on our future race,
We share the sovereignty of time and space.

* * * * *

On three-fold heaven we depend,
The holes within our thoughts to mend.
For science, in dispelling God,
Our underlying purpose robbed,
And now beneath our feet is void,
Our sense of who we are destroyed,
So this age gives no consolations:
Our lives end in mere immolations.
In endless now we must believe,
Or else we wouldn’t live, but grieve.

Our heaven takes dynamic form:
To infinite expansion we are sworn.
Old heaven now is too ethereal;
Our afterlife must be material.
The human race must never be run,
We’ll fly through space, from sun to sun;
So in our lives the first agendum
Is adding to this great momentum.
Out with the old, in with the new;
The future’s always coming through.

Thus in expanding we enjoy,
A sense of ever-lasting joy;
Our three-fold heaven has become
The travelling a continuum:
By extension, heaven’s peace
Already reigns where choice increase.
In Tesco’s aisles, the cornucopia
Reassures us of utopia.
Our range of choices ever mounts:
It’s the seeking after more that counts.

We must have more, and more of all;
This lovely bag, and death’s forestalled.
While our consumption grows apace,
We’re part of an immortal race;
And like a magnate, spend we must,
Or else discover that we’re bust;
Or as the shark, who prowls the deep,
For fear of death, we cannot sleep:
So we dare never tire of Progress,
Now heaven has become a process.

What strain this puts on everyone
To sustain this expansion.
Pursue, our sentence, without rest,
Mankind’s eternal shopping quest.
Such frantic adding, each to their own,
Leaves everyone the more alone;
So, centrifugalled, each will be
Themselves their private galaxy.
All must keep up, for peace of mind:
They speak of death who fall behind.

To feed this ever growing need,
We’ll mine the earth, and without heed
Of nature’s very simple law:
Eventually there’ll be no more.
By nature’s finite stock we’re taught
To govern well our lives by thought;
Yet playing truant, we’ll not learn
The trash and needful to discern.
So goodbye rivers, farewell trees –
So long as we’ve our life of ease.

Addiction must provoke a need
And it only grows the more we feed;
Addiction to material wealth
Works doubly adverse to our health:
Beyond the sad dependency
(Afflicts us psychologically),
Our habits soon annex the earth,
And lead to universal dearth:
So we would heaven realise,
Who only hasten our demise.

* * * * *

In joining mankind, we’d defy
The gravity of death, and fly;
But show the journey finite, too,
And watch the ground come into view.
To merge with mankind is death to delay —
Gravity always has its day.
But crash though we must, we’ll drink and feel groovy,
Look not through the window, but stay with the movie:
We mustn’t look down, we must go the faster,
For we’ve no beliefs to cushion disaster.

Far-sighted souls, hear their call,
For they’ll make you immortal –
Switch to solar, wind, and wave:
Do it once, we’ll forever be safe.
And build an ark, that floats in space,
And thus safeguard the human race.
But they’re a fool, who thinks such power
Could cancel death’s approaching hour.
We may quite postpone the date.
But it’s inescapable, is fate.

Though for aeons we survive,
Our final death will still arrive.
Epochs hence, or just next year,
The principle is quite as clear.
Eventually there’ll be no one,
And all forgot, eternally gone.
And though the greatest genius,
One day you’ll be a never-was.
The body dies, and so the fame,
Which lived on, will then do the same.

An asteroid will strike down Christ,
And from his grave he’ll never rise.
Ophelia’ll no more go for a nun,
When she’s been cindered by the sun.
We sing to Joy with all our breath;
The universe will soon be deaf;
Aphrodite will turn old maid,
No more attention to her paid.
The ripples end, the water clears;
It always is a thing of years.

To look up and see the Abyss,
Is to have it stare back into us.
So our hopes are like rays of light
The black hole digests into night.
Our present’s changed, our future known:
Our Progress is a falling down;
And silly dreams are to nightmares turned,
In which we see utopia burned,
Before it’s crushed into a nought;
This nothing now infects our thought.

* * * * *

But nothing isn’t; whence the fear
Of what will be when we’re not here?
Nothing can’t and won’t exist;
There’s no such thing as the Abyss.
We’ll fade away and die one day
But even once becomes always.
Void will not reach retrospectively
And cancel out our history.
Know we’ll die, but don’t despair:
There always will be something there.

Death is not, remotely, hence,
Biding final recompense;
It’s here and now and everyday,
In everything it’ll have its say.
Death is justice; it gives back
What’s borrowed from the cosmic stack.
Death’s our final guarantee
Things come and go in unity.
Acknowledge death, and learn your role:
We are offspring of the whole.

To things that are, the whole must lend;
And borrowings all have their end.
But paying back’s not done in one;
Each day we live adds to the sum.
Life’s not free till the day the debt’s due;
Each moment has its own value.
And this is good; diamonds, free,
Would soon lose the name of luxury.
On Death’s scales our choices are weighed:
Meaning is by limits made.

Accepting does not mean to seek
Our end in every coming week.
But waking to our mortal state,
And we could put back that final date.
The dandy will their fortune spend,
Half to deny, half to seek its end;
Boredom’s treatment’s more of the same –
We seek our ruin in meaning’s name:
May knowing now our future halt
Cure us of this spendthrift fault?

It’s no new truth that we will die –
It’s always been our destiny.
So why break now in mournful tears
To pay up one’s desperate arrears?
Nothing’s changed; the world’s still here;
And now it has been stripped of fear
Of facing where our race is going
(Knowing that denies it’s knowing).
Admit defeat; you’ve known always;
And find what’s life in living out your days.

Admit we cannot live forever,
And we’ll learn how to live together.
In fleeing death, we flee each other;
We’re solipsistic choice’s lover.
But limit choice, and acceleration
Shall reverse into congregation.
Defined at last, without a sequel,
We’ll seek our solace in finding our equal:
They take time who know it’s short,
To find the eternal in another’s thought.

Existence must, eternally:
Could naked nothing never be.
Each thing must pass, but not the whole;
For that is no thing, but a principle.
And principles are what shape all acts;
They’re what we miss when we seek facts.
But death admitted, they’ll be known,
And in their midst we’ll make our home.
Lives are far too vivid to be lasting,
But all are moulded in an ideal casting.

Death’s in life, whatever we think,
Life is dancing on the brink.
Carry on, and keep expanding;
Or make for us a softer landing?
Let’s the latter, and last the longer,
And meantime make the social stronger,
And mark the miracle of our existence,
Embodied in each other’s presence:
Death makes life, for life can’t last;
The thing’s to live before it’s passed.