A Dream of Heredity
Dreamed c.1986 by John Calvin Rezmerski
I am walking around
with my son on my back and his son sitting on his son's back and I get angry because they are getting a free ride and my feet are numb. I look down at my feet and see they are not moving-- I am sitting on my father's shoulders and he is sitting on his own father's--we are midway more or less in a stack of men that disappears way up into clouds like a tornado, a tornado that spins down to where the stack rests on the back of an ape who is not too bright but has more good will and loyalty than I have ever felt toward him. |
All around us, a mob of women locked arm in arm shout and argue about the whole stack of us, but they
can come face to face only with the ape. Now and then they try to push us over, but whenever someone pushes at the front someone else pushes back from behind. We are a tower, impregnable and unyielding. They are a fierce and irresistible savanna. The air is full of the sound of explosions. The smell of powder is everywhere, and the astringent taste of stalemate. The battle is over. They cannot budge us and we cannot get off each others' backs. We are all paralyzed because the ape can't move. I wake up saying, "Ease off, let the ape breathe. Let me down." |
SOURCE: Alchemy of Stars: Rhysling Award Winners Showcase, by the Science Fiction Poetry Association, 2005; pp.62-3. This shape-poem was a 1987 winner. I've approximated the twister's shape in the anthology, but I wonder if either that version or mine is quite what the poet intended; I haven't seen the original as published in Tales of the Unanticipated #1, 1986. For all I know that tornado was clunky too, and only the manuscript undulated rightly. Hard to convey any dream through the Gate of Machines, but shape-poems are hardest of all.--Chris Wayan, ed.
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