by Enter Shikari

And what comes next
A chance to save ourselves

Imagine magma encrusted in rock
And on the surface of this world
All eyes are on the clock
All our empires, our philosophies
Our practiced faiths
Our revolutions
Our proud sciences
Are all but a flickering
One day in the lives of the stars

We can breathe in space
They just don’t want us to escape
We can breathe in space
They just don’t want us to escape

And what comes next
The constellations, yes, all 88 of them
A chance to save ourselves
Like the G8, they meet to procrastinate

Greetings,
We are an infant species
Crawling into our own premature decline
The north star is chairing the meeting
He knows we’re spoiled
And he’s snickering at our histories

We can breathe in space
They just don’t want us to escape
We can breathe in space
They just don’t want us to escape

The hollow proposals mean we’ll migrate
But they’ll bleed us dry
until the 11th hour
And when dawn breaks I’ll sit and stagnate
With this metric tonne on your shoulders

How do you cope,
We are an infant species
Crawling into our own premature decline
The north star is chairing the meeting
He knows we’re spoiled
And he’s snickering at our histories

Let’s prove the stars wrong
We’ve got to do this

I find it hard to believe that we are alone

Hardcore trance awesomeness!

by Anna Akhmatova

One goes in straightforward ways,
One in a circle roams:
Waits for a girl of his gone days,
Or for returning home.

But I do go — and woe is there —
By a way nor straight, nor broad,
But into never and nowhere,
Like trains — off the railroad.

Andrey Kneller has done a wonderful translation of “I don’t think of you often at all…”

I don’t think of you often at all
I’m not interested much in your fate
But the imprint you left on my soul
On our trivial meeting won’t fade.

…

by Mary Oliver

My father, for example,
who was young once
and blue-eyed,
returns
on the darkest of nights
to the porch and knocks
wildly at the door,
and if I answer
I must be prepared
for his waxy face,
for his lower lip
swollen with bitterness.
And so, for a long time,
I did not answer,
but slept fitfully
between his hours of rapping.
But finally there came the night
when I rose out of my sheets
and stumbled down the hall.
The door fell open

and I knew I was saved
and could bear him,
pathetic and hollow,
with even the least of his dreams
frozen inside him,
and the meanness gone.
And I greeted him and asked him
into the house,
and lit the lamp,
and looked into his blank eyes
in which at last
I saw what a child must love,
I saw what love might have done
had we loved in time.

© Mary Oliver