In the Next Life, Canto I, stanzas 24-27

For the first time in several days, I am drawn no further into this business, except that I shall be required to spend more time at the keyboard than usual. Other than the initial formatting difficulties, the process of writing this blog had been fairly painless until today. Perhaps staff are needed at Google to maintain the paste buffer functionality, and nobody fills those positions on weekends. More likely something in my home computer is incompatible with the dialog box in which I now find myself typing every letter and punctuation mark of this post. Needless to say, I have little to report. On second thought, it is not needless to say that. I would have typed every letter of this paragraph and the next even had I been able to copy and paste the part that I composed years ago, the dusting off of which is the primary purpose of this undertaking. I shall have to learn how to add a copyright symbol at the end, however.

With that out of the way, here is today's bit of verse. Fortunately, no annotations were deemed necessary for these stanzas:

In order to accomplish this, they'll need
Some healthy men and women they can train.
These individuals will be the seed
from which society will grow again.

The problem here: They can't just advertise
for volunteers to live while others die.
For this to work, it must be a surprise.
It doesn't take a genius to see why.

A similar endeavor's what they need,
compatible with what they want to do.
Become involved, discredit those who lead,
then take control and work some changes through.

It just so happens something of the sort
is being planned but isn't yet in place:
an underwater test of life support
in preparation for a home in space.

© 2010 Louis A. Merrimac

The internet partially redeems itself once again: I found the secret code for the symbol. I would have typed rather than copied this part as well, but it would have been irrelevant had the internet not frustrated me in the first place.