Waltz of the 101st Lightborne

I believed they had got what they came for;

I believed our peril was done

On the eve of the last of the Great Wars

After three we had narrowly won

(But the fourth

It was carelessly done.)

I saw his ship in its whistling ascension

As they launched from the Capitol seat–

Swear I saw our mistake

When the clouds draped like a flag

Across the backs of the fleet

Of the Hundred-First Lightborne Elite

As the day is long

So the well runs dry

And we came to see Time is taller

Than Space is wide

And we bade goodbye

To the Great Divide:

Found unlimited simulacreage to colonize!

But there was a time we were lashed to the prow

Of a ship you may board, but not steer

Before You and I ceased to mean Now

And began to mean only Right Here

(to mean Inches and Miles, but not Years);

Before Space has a taste of its limits

And a new sort of coordinate awoke

Making Time just another poor tenant:

Bearing weight, taking fire, trading smokes

In the war between us and our ghosts

(But I saw the Bering Strait and the Golden Gate

In silent suspension of their golden age!

And you can barely tell, if I guard it well

Where I have been, and seen

Pristine, unfelled.)

I had a dream that I walked in the garden

Of Chabot, and those telescope ruins

It was there that I called to my true love

Who was pale as millennial moons

Honey, where did you come by that wound?

When I woke, he was gone

And the War had begun

In eternal return and repeat

Calling, Where in the hell are the rest of your fellow

One Hundred-One Lightborne Elite?

Stormed in the New Highland Light Infantry

Make it stop, my love!

We were wrong to try

Never saw what we could unravel

In traveling light

Nor how the trip debrides–

Like a stack of slides!

All we saw was that Time is taller than Space is wide

That's why we are bound to a round desert island

'neath the sky where our sailors have gone

Have they drowned, in those windy highlands?

Highlands away, my John