Lonely Sea and the Sky (The Repose of Rivers Remix)
Remix Author: hossgal
Original Story: Mare Tranquilus by Thea
Summary: Earthlings, mortals, men.
Rating: PG
Fandom: Farscape
Warnings: Umm. Poetry.
Spoilers: Season 4: Terra Firma and A Constellation of Doubt
Terra
The alien ship arrives.
Old, and yet child,
minor still, no title, no name
save those she grants herself.
Accustomed to the pattering barrage of millennia,
she shrugs the rocks of ages away,
seldom notices the burn,
nor the fractional pull
from new lights
among the dust of her train.
Now there is one
insistent
gold
and strange to her Sun.
She has birthed whales
greater than this void-vagabond,
slept sound
under storms that could shatter
star-stuff keel.
This traveler is no older
than her youngest sea -
transient, thistledown,
mayfly.
She listens.
***
Peter D. Cowkeep, Staff Sergeant, USAF, 45th Security Forces Squadron, Patrick Air Force Base
The aliens are assigned escorts.
Left Big Cypress as soon as he could
Walked away from the dancing and the gawkers,
left the fancy dress and the liquor,
the feathers, the tomahawks, the paint.
Never left the homeland, his grandfather,
Never forgot night fires, burning black muck.
sigh of the wind in sawgrass,
heat in forenoon, standing thick, close.
He remembered the heat in Texas, amidst the dust
as three score feet stamped in place
threw San Antonio sand into billowing clouds,
as Cowkeep learned a new place, a new name.
He forgot the heat at Khobar, in the black smoke,
broken glass, the taste of copper in his mouth.
Forgot it until he was home again,
and still among the departed.
He never forgot the rain - darkness in the afternoon
bands of jet over silver over golden sea of reeds
and the swift flickers of lightning clawing
at the skin of the earth, until the land caught fire.
It is winter now, the year grows cool and wet.
Cowkeep stands post, keeps watch over outlanders
who gaze, amused, at the stripes and rituals,
live ignorant of heat lightning and thunderheads.
They used the word enigma for the thing
that looked like a woman, walked like a panther
stared back at him with eyes pale as starlight
dark as night before earth threw away the moon.
Through the glasses, through the armor,
she looks at him, and shrugs acceptance,
folds away her knives, her hands,
waits, until her terms are attended.
He follows her - home - not home, never home,
she only takes her rest here, snake bird
on a limb, waiting for the sun. Not home -
He follows, as the winter gusts soak them through.
She is not enigma. He is Cowkeep.
He has been sung over, cussed at, saluted.
He has seen the elephant, ridden the sands
walked the line. He understands mystery.
She is anhinga, and she does not mind the rain.
***
Eugene "Levi" Jackson, First Lieutenant, USAF, 45th Space Wing, Patrick AFB
The aliens are restless, seek diversions.
He was born to fly.
He was going to be Chappie.
He was going to be Old Guy.
The world turns and all things change
and he was just the guy,
when this spaceman's
alien squeeze
got ants in her pants
and wanted to waltz.
He was born to fly, not sit baggage seat,
meant to handle the stick, not gape
as the curve of the world retreated
and indigo descended over the sea.
Not meant to shudder, to weep,
at the field of shimmering stars
against the black wall of unending night.
He was born to fly and she was made -
drawn from the rib of the god of light -
to bring him beyond flight and into space.
He could die - second seat, just like Robbie Lawrence -
but he has nothing to teach her,
nothing to exchange for the heartbeats spent here.
The moon's dust should tremble in their path
but there is no wind left to wake
only rock, footprints, and an unwavering flag.
She returns him to the earth - spinning into day,
turning into darkness - even the night lit
by the cities and hearts and works of man -
but there is no going back again.
***
Special Agent-in-Charge Margot Shawell, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Atlanta Branch Office
The aliens are attacked, and defend themselves. There is damage, property and otherwise.
Not a pane remains entire.
Her men sift the striped wallpaper,
untangle the lights,
intently search for alien findings
while they look aside from human remains.
Wind, unheeding proprieties
that lawmen must abide,
whistles through the walls,
flutters dark plastic shawl.
Outside, the river shifts slow, laps away
at pilings, at shore, at the world.
Here there is nothing water may offer -
not cleansing, not refuge, not salvation.
There are only the dead, and the departed,
and the things they leave behind.
Margot's mother bore her late, as did hers before her.
That woman - bitter, stooped, skin like spiderwebs
woven fine and grey into a taller woman's cloak -
that woman would not understand what Margot knows.
That woman disbelieved Houston, Neil, Tranquility Base.
But here, in this house that is home no more,
where shots fired in anger and fear and cold calculation
stitched light through red bricks, red stockings,
burned a cuneiform Margot cannot read into the tiles -
in this house, her grandmother would see white columns
trailing wisteria and honeysuckle vines
moon-shaped eclipses in the siding - cannon-ball-carved -
and the weeds grown up through the lintel step.
would see a war lost, a people fled, lost, defeated
cane broken down, never to rise again.
Margot stares through the agents, the wreckage,
the house, this evidence of an era's ending
past the river to the white ship
standing against the sky.
Glass crumbles underfoot, becomes dust again.
***
Luna
The aliens have departed.
Night's daughter, sister-sphere
to Sol's azure jewel.
Opal, old ivory, weathered bones
of a world that never was,
airless, breathless, lightless
empty seas filled with dust.
'round the wick, Luna spins
weaves together bonds, beckonings
Joins her call to
the tug of the tide,
reaches across galaxies,
calls the sailor home.
The End
Notes:
Big Cypress - Big Cypress Seminole Indian Reservation, FL
San Antonio - Lackland AFB, San Antonio, TX
Khobar - Khobar Towers complex in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
Chappie - General Daniel "Chappie" James, Jr., USAF
Guy - Guion "Guy" Bluford - NASA Astronaut
Robbie Lawrence - Major Robert Henry Lawrence, Jr., USAF
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