Requiem For a Nightmare

Imagine Earth itself to be just another Troy, from which, after having raged In countless battles from Tyre to Megiddo has not been conquered, only aged And now, having defeated the Spartan race, destroying Priam’s home Odysseus is captain of a spacecraft with the direction of Ithaca not known On land to land, world to world, asteroid to comet, sun to galaxy he will wander lost With endless delay, look askance-or with wanderlust-be unable to define a host Of angels, like the first home, who—with celestial sound—closed God on a throne Only future starmen will proceed without God's advantage, in empty space all alone The victory of God against Satan, here, unproclaimed with all men lost, in between The endless battles of lucifer and the deity; heaven's splinter to the devil's spleen The past ages of travail, a mere testing ground of efficacy, the master's saving grace With the bulk of humanity, like chaff of wheat, having been sifted, as if only a race Mankind, having run as a race, a race, quite long, the original cause forgotten How corruption had entered, how the fall began, when Eve traipsed the garden Yet the race of man; his nature, his spoke, his mind, like a wheel intermingled Along with the path of the gods--their flight, their call--the Seth of Eve first jingled How could he not but cry out, from crib, in inter-mixed and complex strain Since so saith Adam's wife, doting upon her first real child aptly named Appointed to replace her prior kind, one stricken and one banished Shepherd Abel first, died, from blight of Cain, latter, whose soul famished If not his body, since fed with fruit and till of the land, in parched curse His work distilled into nonsense, and measure as much less in worth Then the gentle, strange and loving work of the Shepherd's hand From Shepherd to shepherd, the Maker gave not to Abel land Since he roamed from brook to brook, or down into gentle meadow With his staff in hand, and flock afoot, only the caves like ghettos Learning manly ways and singing with chest open and bare Under open sky, canopy misting light, and all of life seeming fair The Lord, himself, culling Abel's rapport and favour, giving him trust Rather than partition acres, cubits or parcels of land, if only just just