Gliders

How I love to watch them coast the air!
Even the birds seem struck with wonder
And pause mid wing in disbelief.
These lords and ladies of the sky
Receive our silent emissaries
With mute, unfeigned astonishment.

What strange reverse! We vainly seek
Our gods in heaven while the birds,
The keepers of their heaven, seek
For us, the glider gods, here on earth.

Did I say “gods”? Better than gods,
For if cannot glide ourselves
We learn to make a thing that can.
Our creatures do what we cannot
And yet our creatures they remain.

How dull, merely to be a god,
Seeing only among the blind,
Omnisient for an inferior world
Of no surprises, a cosmic nursery maid
Watching an endless brood,
A nanny for all eternity.

To surround yourself, not with trivial things,
But only the best the mind conceives,
Isn’t this to be better than any god?
To have a world, not at your command,
But open to your every action,
And other worlds beyond that world?

Such is our fate, our fortunate fate,
We gods of earth. And though before
Great nature’s face we seem but naught,
And though in an empty universe
We may on the very pit’s edge stand,
It is we who will prevail, who stride
Beyond the earth and coast the air,
We! For all the world like gliders.