Of Gods and Strangers
I dreamt of lost vocabularies
Lines of poet-monks
Dialects of the Tao
Encoded in obscure Buddhist texts
Mantras of the Rishis
Wisdom of the ancients
Sanskrit whispers of sages
I have heard them all in my imagination
Or, the forgotten dialect of heart
In modern man, whose hunger
For profit is a world-destroying greed
A few generations, so much lost!
I dreamt of slow locomotives of
Quantum physics, artificial-intelligence
A million times more intelligent
Than the collective intelligence of all humans
And all this comes to pass
Progress, industry, prosperity, technology
I saw them all, existing in a relative permanence
That was as fragile as an empire
In ancient times, each one thinking itself immortal
I dreamt of the prophecies of Mayan priests
On the scorched Earth where our descendants
Mourned, for their inheritance
Our legacy and our people, were yours
I dreamt the past and the future as one moment.
Wuji Seshat 