“Outcast” © Edward Michael Supranowicz

 

Flying Blind

What I expected to find I didn’t really know
Rounding Jupiter, the first landmark I’ve recognized on the return
Or boomerang journey, I’m not clear on the specifics
How I was launched into space, not alone but presently
The last of the company returning
Don’t know at all how the crises have played out
That were plaguing my home world when we were sent off
On a brave exploratory journey (so said our workboards)
Which may have produced results–all the data
Accumulated must mean something
They could have enlightened us, but we speculated
There wasn’t time before our sudden departure
After a while the data practically accumulate by themselves
Once the initial templates and parameters
Are set it’s simply a matter of keyboard input
Which might as well be in Greek for all any of us understand it
Except for Stavros (the first of us to be injected
In a coffin size capsule somewhere
Don’t ask me where, we’d lost our way as badly
As the people we left behind, which is why apprehension
(Sometimes I play his recordings of Euripides
Works well as background out in the depths of space
I can follow cadence, even shifts of persona
If not any of the actual words)
Mounts as I approach the familiar blue-green marble
Data flooding our receptors which no one thought
To prepare us to interpret so it’s a surprise landing then
What I’m going to find I really don’t know

 

Martin Heavisides has published in FRiGG, Mad Hatter’s Review, Feast of Laughter, The Linnet’s Wings and numerous other journals of discerning taste. His play Empty Bowl was published in The Linnet’s Wings and given a live staged reading at Living Theatre, New York.

Edward Michael Supranowicz has had artwork and poems published in the US and other countries. Both sides of his family worked in the coalmines and steel mills of Appalachia.