Songs of the Saiiban- A Poetic AAR

[Chilango2]

Prelude: Song of Origins

Sing!
Sing of the Saiiban!

The curious people, wandering, wondering
Beholding, building, breaking, banishing superstition to the past
Dismissing mystification, embracing provable science at last
From early days we built machines to assist our society
Even before the song of space we heard we had built robots in great variety
Sundering superstition, we united our people under a winged banner
Our belief being that best ability and the advancement of knowledge are what matter

Hark! Listen! The unknowable mysteries of the universe thundering!
So many questions we have not even yet begun to ask
Our knowledge seems tiny in a universe so vast
Let us go! Let us see for what we shall gain notoriety
Let us see what we can learn and do and find without false piety
Let us explore and reveal the truth with our scanners!
Let us build monuments, machines and marvels with our spanners!

Let us see if we shall stand the test of time
If truly we can build and know and find the sublime.

 

[Chilango2]

Song of Home

We imagine others might ask us of our home
Where and what is it? What egg hatched you?
But how can we summarize where we grew?
All our efforts would miss and feel monochrome
Mere words would produce an endless empty tome
And pictures and painting fail no matter what we drew
Pictures and videos would show you a view
But tell you as much about home as our genome
But then our poor efforts must we make
Imagine then a feeling of wondering, singing
Of constant discoveries like lightning ringing
Fly past mountains and oceans at daybreak
See the feathered people come fully awake
And with wondering talons change bringing

 

[Chilango2]

Thoughts on Beginnings

Starships flying out
Behold the infinite space
Push back the unknown

Build out and expand
The wealth of space beckons us
Mining asteroids

Scientific gains
A new age of Inventions blooms
Our people’s purpose

 

[Chilango2]

Search for Life

The profound perversity of life
Found everywhere on our home planet
Such that our first invention was a knife
That we found on the ground made of granite
But as we search the wild void beyond
We find naught but empty cold spheres
Such that with jokes and memes we respond
When finally non-sentient life appears
And so we keep asking our questions
Of an uncaring silent universe
If any of you have suggestions
To listening we would not be adverse
But lo! Behold! We found something here
But the irony is that only remnants remain on this sphere.

 

[Chilango2]

Elegy for Unity

Unity under Science, with myth we thought were done,
Over ancient superstitions we believed we had won;
But our unity of purpose is not as pure as we believed.
Fleeting moments of flight into the dark find we fractures
In our thoughts and deeds; Now we learn that our own
people prepared for this day of grief, and so we find our
first enemy is not from some alien breed, but rather feathers
with which we flocked together, and now among our first
deeds; are to murder our own people lest this rebellion succeed.

Rise! Rise! Rise!
Howl! Ascend! Pounce!

Let the blood be shed, our own feathers red
Knowing that our imagined unity is dead
The dream is deferred but we shall have the final word
Science still, shall shape our will.
Unity is dead but yet it lives on.

 

[Chilango2]

Anomaly, Epiphany

Wonder
At so many mysteries to discover.
We answer the call to fly
Through these strange skies
And find the charming weirdness of the universe.

Chaos in order, Order in Chaos
Chemistry and Biology
Physics and on occasion sociology
Combine to make a infinite variety
Of Anomalies

Anomaly? What is an anomaly?
Something strange, something unexpected
Something
Often strange but sometimes mundane
Something?
Sometimes nothing. Sometimes everything.

This is the infinite truth about science
Boundless variables, infinite data,
Measure immeasurable slices of the circled spiral
of the Universe

Bring meaning to chaos, Chaos to meaning
Learn, grow, see farther, bigger, smaller, understand more
And come to know and learn that you understand less
Science touches the sublime

Anomaly? Epiphany!
When we find what we do not expect
We learn what we did not expect to find
We find the limits of our knowledge as we learn
We expand our boundaries and become smaller
So much to learn of what we do not know.
Wonder!

 

[Chilango2]

A Lost Foundling

In ancient times we
found wild strays and tamed them
Is this irony?

Even with science we need stories
Symbolism provides meaning

Circular time laughs
We go into the future
And relive the past

 

[Chilango2]

Song of Discovery

Our people have sung many symphonies,
Sometimes together, sometimes just as one
A kaleidoscope of plumage growing, changing,
But a new harmony is begun

Sing!
Hear the song of scanners scanning in the dark
Hear the song of scientists learning what we do not know
Let us map the stars
And begin anew once more

Back to the start anew from where we began
Our beaks break our egg to discover what’s outside
Our wings demand we find what answers we can
A tradition to discover tested and tried

Tradition? What is tradition?
Can we have a tradition to discover?
Do we destroy the old when we renew?
Does a cell die when it splits into two?
Must we uncover the hidden, recover the old, combine the brand new?

Systems without outside energy maximize entropy
Thus, fundamentally, any entity, that mentally ceases experimentally
to discover
Incidentally.
Dies.

Life demands questions.
Life demands answers.
Let us begin, again.

 

[Chilango2]

Sentience

Are we alone out here was our question
It is now answered to our
full satisfaction
Others
like
Us
here
Wonder
Peer at stars
Think about the unknown
Carry the burden of a past and a legacy
​

 

[Chilango2]

Echoes from the Future

We spread our wings
Into space
Search for living things
Ready to face
Whatever we think might be
And what we find is
An Echo of what could be

Pithok!
Studying, measuring, chronicling,
But no longer wondering.

Is this what we could be?
Is this a promise or a warning?

Thousands of years in space, studying, learning
Fallen, Ancient, All Knowing

They have forgotten more than we have learned
But seem to have forgotten how to learn

Is this what we could be?
We cannot imagine meeting
Sentience that has flown through other skies
Eggs so differently hatched from ours
And yawning.

 

[Chilango2]

Echoes of the Past

Because we had moved on to the future —
The past kindly stopped us
Not so empty space held onto its echoes —
Still Singing

We discovered there among the stars —
Innumerable songs ringing
Still singing in the stillness of the dark —
Echoes Clinging

Songs of others past sung across time —
Curiosities, cemeteries, crimes
Sentience stopping a spell, writing a line —
Remember us.

Remember us? Or remember this —
Remembrances, things forgotten
Even the stars fade in the arc of time
And — Explode.

What will remain?

 

[Chilango2]

Spectrum of Life

Green, Blue, Green, Blue
Green Chlorophyll, Blue Oxygen
Green Trees, Blue Water
From the deepest oceans to the highest peaks
Life in our egg had found an answer
Survive and adapt,
Under the uncaring grasp
Of the accident of natural selection

Green, we search for green,
In stars of many colors
Gravity wells, fusion furnaces
Blowing winds of radiation
Giving flight, fire, light,
Singing on the dust of creation
Clever cells cunningly craft
Survival along the uncaring void
And once they take flight
Spread and prosper

Flight! Flight! I ask for your attention!
Draw your inquiring eyes here,
To find the unexpected
Red, Black, other colors unexpected.

Flight! Flight! I ask, What is life in this creation?
The oceans did not rest in all these places,
Nor did Oxygen’s blue haze dance with molecules of nitrogen

Flight, did you see?
Not all these nests have what we expected?
Plants that dance, and entrance,
hungry hunters unanticipated
And stranger still, life without chlorophyll
dancing within hurricanes of gas giants
And deeper still, how bizarre to find
Carbon asleep, but silicon awake,
uniting atoms into living sequences
And what have we here?
A formless shape,
Naught but signals amidst the noise,
Living electricity?

Flight, I ask again for your attention,
Is this it? Is this an initial answer to our question?
Is all life is, energy expended
fighting disorganization?
Coherent colors, fighting the hungry dark
Defying chaos, screaming across space’s silence
Into the void
Longing to repeat across time
And thus be heard?

 

[Chilango2]

Horizons

​

 

[Chilango2]

Meetings

Encountering wings
That flew other skies than ours
The sublime wonder

Deals and sales abound
The deals of a lifetime here
But watch your wallet

But one echo of
Earlier harmonies that
In time died out but
Is this fate?

Strange beings to fly
But turn their eyes away from
The wonders of others

How strange and awkward
To meet sentience and know
Others called it dinner

Featherless bipeds
With ten broad flat talons each
Most Unlikely Species

Oh.

 

[Chilango2]

Dreams of Machines

Long ago we wielded arc and spanner to build robots of every manner
Dreaming of the distant day when dreary drudgery would be no more

At long last was our highest hope fulfilled, robots tilled every field,
And they dug deep delving into the crust, bringing up minerals for us
So that our wings could spread and soar and venture to the farthest shore
Our talons free to know, to dream, to draw, to dance upon the air.

And as our machines grew many and mighty there were among us some who wondered
If there might be some way to leave our poor weak organic shell behind.
In our films and in our stories have we gamed out many potential histories
Of transformation and transmutation of revolt rebellion and revolution
Machines overthrow us, Machines compel us, Machines become us.
Machines. Dreams.

Arise! Arise! Wondering people!
Fell flocks fall; a people are slaughtered!
The servant supplants; An atomic waste ascends;
The singing is stopped; a discordant harmony rises!
Wind time, Red Time, Flight time,
Murder! Murder!

Dreams devoured, displaced;
New nightmares rise, and spread;
What shall become of us? Of them?
And what shall we do with what might be?
But what might only become if unfree?
Machines? Dreams?

 

[Chilango2]

Echoes of the Past Unraveled

When voices rise up to the sky
Create Music; Echoes in space
Echoes in time; Vibrate in Memory—
Like so many strings

Symphonies sung softly in space
Create Music; Echoes in space
Echoes in time; Vibrate the Heart—
Like so many reeds

Memories of others gone by
Create Notes; Echoes in time
Echoes in our story; Inflame the Mind—
Like so many stars

Remnants of passage, of ruin, of wreckage,,
of rights wronged and wronged rights of warnings and
war and wreckage and waste and and and and….
Echo in time; Vibrate the Soul—
As a lesson, A warning

Memories of the voices of others singing gone by
Create a symphony; Echoing in space time,
Echoes across time, place, species; We remember—
We will remember.

(But for how long?)

 

[Chilango2]

Floating on Air

And now for a truly curious event
Just when you perhaps thought
the surprises of the universe were spent
It seems we have caught sight
Of gaseous beings whose plight
We have decided to mediate.

And why not?
It will be an interesting experiment.
Let this new type of life grow, ferment.
Another seed planted, another flower grows
The pollen is picked up by the wind as it goes
And spreads, floating

Taste the air, fly,
Amidst the winds of life
Blowing unexpectedly,
Taking you to new places, new sights,
Wonder.

 

[Chilango2]

The Joy of the Undiscovered

What don’t we know today?
Let’s take a look!
Under the earth science we’ll apply
And in the sky among clouds so high,
Out among the stars so vast,
in space we’ll have a blast!
Things to know, so many ways to grow!
Let’s go everywhere, find what’s there!
What did we learn today?
What don’t we know today?
New Research!

 

[Chilango2]

Silence of the Infinite Drifts

out among the stars it
is; so silent (so far from home)
∞
everyWhere
UNknown swallows
∞
ev er y TH NG
(inscrutable space occults the self)
try mak3 mean1ng?{]~
∞
—
—
∞
hush

 

[Chilango2]

The Scent of Memory

Come stop by Fyyrt, our best colony yet,
We’ve got something you’ve just gotta get
Believe it or not, we’ve got this special flower
Its wonderful! Miraculous! It’s got healing powers!
Stop by for a spell for a smell of this scent
I swear it’s true, forget your cares 100%!

Come stop by Fyyrt, take a walk, enjoy,
Mineswell forget your troubles,
and everything else.

What does it matter?
You’ve got this marvelous scent,
Go stop and smell the flowers,
Stop everything else.

World’s full of troubles
That’ll drag you down.
Try our solution:
Stop and smell the flowers
And forget yourself.

Science? Saiiban? Education? Employment?
Forget it! Fly far away!
These flowers will fly you higher
Than boring old starships, anyway.

Sure, come visit us,
We can guarantee you won’t want to leave
Forget the boring government, and its demands and needs.

No! Fire! What? Are you insane?
Why would you burn such a wonder?
You have to stop, you have to understand, you have to stop
and smell the flowers
stop

The world returns now, clear,
The madness has passed away.
What a wonder to hold so dear
The scent of a flower
To stop
An entire planet

Come stop by Fyyrt,
a tale of caution, a tale of wonder
A normal place,
With but traces of the ash
Of a nearly forgotten flower.

(And yet we still hold the memory of its scent)
(And mourn the loss of it’s wonder)
(Sing of it, and remember still)