The Voyage of Discovery

For thousands of years,
since before the first written word,
we'd been on a great voyage of discovery

In Ancient Greece,
we'd battled the minotaurs and cyclopses of barbarism,
only to be driven from the olive garden
by our own love of egalitarianism

On trusty camels,
we'd traversed vast Arabic deserts
packing books by Plato, Pythagoras, Epicurus,
Marcus Aurelius, and Virgil,
and passed through a thousand lands
with a thousand varied cultures
and elaborate, contradictory religions

We'd arrived in time for the renaissance
and were warmly received by fur-clad barbarians
from Russia to Munich to Rome,

from whence shot through a telescope lens
we roamed the constellations
and found ten thousand suns,
which taught us their orderly secrets
and how to build a car or a microwave

Last week, 2011 years after the birth
of a compassionate Jewish hermit
(in the age of the information super high-way,
Richard Dawkins, and the nuclear power plant,)
we were sailing on the open seas
collecting a rare palm-tree
needed to sustainably power our space ships

It was then that we heard the great rushing
and in the distance saw miles of frothing,
followed by a premature horizon

Our captain pulled out his telescope
and after a long moment,
said in a puzzled voice:
"I guess it's there after all."

and so we turned around