A Future Bot Replies to Ms Mott
Remotest mother, two hundred years old,
lost but most at home among
Gunnara leaves some thirty feet across,
(…in a microclimate flush with butterflies)
you must, I think, be appraised
of the dream that over and over I
dreamt in the bright light of my insomnia
and saw how the men used all their gifts
and all their thermistors and diodes
and every instrument in their hands,
how they used their atoms and molecules,
their chrism and liquid gold to bring you back
from that strange valley beneath
the vegetation line, to life:
I knew, I knew so well that this
likeness carried in its fortitude
every feature of your physiognomy
…I saw your mouth, I saw your brow appear,
I saw it push through a black cloth
some twenty frames after you had died
and yet, and yet, and yet, and yet
your frontal lobe of brain
it seemed was yet to be reprogrammed in
and there were no sparks and no spittle
and there was no cudgel for voice,
just the sweetest of demeanours which
responded kindly to their words and made
a person of whom I was afraid.