Tragedy of the Bomb Runs
The aliens were hostile
That much was clear right from the start
They crash landed in fiery style
Burrowed into a mountain’s heart
They were not hurt despite the crash
For they were some strange form of spore
And their initial mountain cache
Was sample enough to make more
They turned the rock around them
Into a raw particle juice
And then into a sort of phlegm
With which they merged to reproduce
The off-world spore grew rather fast
It doubled itself every day
Ate out a cavern dark and vast
Much to the government’s dismay
***
The army had of course made note
When the non-natives had arrived
Then tracked their interstellar boat
To the mountain where it nosedived
The tunnel that the crash had dug
Soon filled with buzz from army drones
Which saw the spore begin to chug
The atoms from the mountain stones
The pentagon could do the math
On spore that daily doubled size
And saw not too far down that path
Every atom on earth’s demise
They fed the media a line
And told the public to stay calm
Then sent into the makeshift mine
A large and most unfriendly bomb
***
Explosion rocked the mountain home
Of earth’s first confirmed visitors
And fire filled their catacomb
To snuff them like the dinosaurs
But when the smoke cleared from the cave
In which the growing spore had fed
The army found it not a grave
The martians were by no means dead
The spore was much reduced in mass
It’s cave was mostly empty dark
But on the spying drone’s next pass
It spotted a remaining mark
Of spore stuck to the cavern wall
The bombing had been much in vain
For in that dark sub-mountain pall
The spore began to grow again
***
The bombing campaign did not cease
Simply because the first one failed
No one suggested we make peace
Calls for war were not countervailed
But more bombs had the same effect
The spore not gone, merely reduced
Leaving enough to resurrect
The threat the crash had introduced
We tried out gas and napalm too
We shot X-rays right through the rock
Each caused some damage to accrue
But the spore’s growth they did not block
Abruptly some miles to the West
Inside a second mountain there
A new spore started to ingest
The rock and carve itself a lair
***
A third and then a fourth were found
No one could tell from whence they’d come
If more spacecraft had struck the ground
Or all from the one landing sprung
It gave the public quite a spook
When soon the word leaked to the press
We felt compelled to fire a nuke
Such was the level of distress
But all our megatonnage dropped
Could only make the spores reset
The moment that the bombing stopped
The spores resumed their growing threat
Still no other new spores appeared
Beyond that first grouping of four
And though they never disappeared
Bombing them was a simple chore
***
We bombed all four daily at first
The air force made a special group
And every time a new bomb burst
The spore was reduced to a soup
For six months human kind was rapt
Spellbound by the alien show
But our attention spans are capped
With any changeless status quo
The politicians lost their verve
For stoking fear of growing spores
And failed it’s backing to preserve
When passing bills to fund their wars
So then we bombed just every week
The spores still did not grow immense
Not large enough to havoc wreak
Nor make the situation tense
***
But this dynamic went along
Politics turned to other things
Assuming that our bombs were strong
Short and shorter grew the purse strings
Everyone knew the bombs must drop
But the Left hated bombs writ large
The Right wanted spending to stop
To cut taxes when they’re in charge
The foreigners were even worse
For we’d asked them to pay their share
But they were loathe to open purse
For some supposed threat elsewhere.
Our bombing went bimonthly now
The spore each time grew frightful huge
A size we’d not thought we’d allow
Before we chose to play the scrooge
***
We lived for years thus on the brink
The spores ate their mountains away
But most of us did not need think
About it in our day to day
Until one month a heart attack
Killed the man assigned to deploy
The bombs that beat the spore-threat back
And no backup did we employ
So thin had grown our will to fund
This world-saving bomb routine
We let the spores become fecund
And erupt after years serene
A week passed before we noted
The death of the bomb technician
By then the spores had promoted
To exponential condition
***
We bombed them when we realized
Our button-presser’d bit the dust
By by then spore had colonized
The earth’s mantle beneath its crust
Far out of reach of all our bombs
Though we fired them for all their worth
The spore began with zero qualms
To hollow out the very earth
Two days later earthquakes commenced
Tectonic plates became unstuck
The disaster we hadn’t sensed
Was really clearly going to suck
Our hollow globe lost all its spin
Before the martians’ meal was done
No humans left to feel chagrin
As earth tumbled into the sun
***
All problems take place over time
Some short but some grow long and old
The old slip easy from the mind
Though it’s by these that fate’s controlled
The zig-zag of a day and night
Is naught in time’s unbroken line
Yet now is all we have to fight
This moment in the grand design
To tend tomorrow from today
Is genius and a subtle art
To focus and not turn astray
Picks out the wise from merely smart
We lose that and we disappear
More easily than we admit
We have but one life-giving sphere
We’d better tend it and not quit
END
Thanks as always for reading! If you enjoyed this poem, please help me out by liking, commenting, and sharing with others. Have a great week, and I’ll be back next Sunday with something fun.
Fun, thoughtful and Yikes!!
I enjoyed reading this one Owen. It’s a good one.