Mission to Xcalpoa
By: John Grey
I'm in a capsule
with twenty-one others.
We're buckled tight,
injected with a freezing agent,
whizzing through blank space.
We'll be two hundred years
in stasis,
exiled from life
while keeping up with time,
the human sum
of calculations
by NASA sciences
who won't live
to see the results.
When I wake,
the future I imagined
will be back there in the past,
superseded by formulae,
cryogenics, super-fuels
and galaxy-wide tracking systems.
I'll be on a planet
many light years from Earth,
with twenty-one others,
like the first book of a Bible
whose mission is to seed
the books to come.
There'll be life awaiting us
but crude, still crawling
out of oceans.
With our tools, our supplies,
our technology and ingenuity,
we'll fast forward evolution
all the way up to ourselves.
We're pioneers.
The first of the first.
Forgotten on Earth already,
we're on our way to be remembered.
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