The Metaphoratorium

  One-Way Portal - in memory of the Jim-Jones-style suicides at Heavens Gate by cult members who believed they had reached a higher plain of existance and no longer needed their bodies - who believed a space ship tagging along behind a comet would beam aboard their souls into a heavenly realm. - intense belief, fatal dellusion, a waste of life.
As Earth’s mechanical eyes scan not-so-empty darkness,

     her restless children ache to dance

    spiral-armed,  down galaxies,

    chase cosmic winds on callused primate feet.

Unsatisfied as voyeurs,

    39 webheads queued at Heaven's Gate

    backpacks at the ready, humming at the window,

    eating tapioca, they clutched plastic,

            vacuous and opaque, 

    waited for data retrieval,

    personal uploads facing unrecoverable  error

    depression deferred in bunk-bed suburban stillness,

    escape velocity for the purple-shrouded dead.

They hardly knew their Mother.

Bury them in her darkest loam,

        rich compost of stars.

April 6, 1997

 Nothing, hidden behind a comet

©1997 Marjorie M. Walker