Laker Thrasher
UW Hospital
2024
Poem
On what I can only assume was a beautiful day
Enrico Fermi proposed a problem
that everyone understood
a cosmic ouroboros
head to tail, beginning to end
the eternal return
to the infernal question:
Are we alone in the universe?
And we’ll spend the rest of our lives answering it
I. The Great Filter.
Hope is a dog
that only knows how to run
we gave it no choice
take out the teeth,
and what does that leave you?
Something that must go
as far as it can.
Panting, we race
around the great track of The Milky Way
the odds 9-to-1,
and no one on our side.
But where does a dog go
after the finish line?
And how does it know
when to stop?
II. It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy others.
We have not met our end,
but it is coming to meet us
the bug under the glass,
the severed legs in the stars,
the once-bright beat of our wings
too stained by fingers to fly again.
Someone deems us unimportant,
and there comes the shoe
we are familiar with war
but we are unfamiliar
with being small
III. It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself.
Through blue light, I watch
a mother dam
the hole
in her baby’s head.
Across seas,
the swell of her swan song
reaches through my screen
and shoves a fistful of feathers down my throat.
Do I really need to explain this to you?
IV. We are alone.
Not the center of the universe,
but the flaw within it
a single speck
in a single galaxy
that found the will to survive when we shouldn’t have
I know what I said about hope before,
but the blood in our bark is a kindness
at least we can’t hurt anyone else
V. We are not alone.
There are eyes on all sides
but they are afraid of what they see
after all, what do we call
what we don’t know?
Foreign
Strange
Alien
we say these words
before we say friends
can we blame them
for driving by?
Anyway, the hypotheses have never been the point
I care less about the stars
and more about the people who look up to them
and what every scientist has to say
only says more about us
So we answer Fermi’s question:
Where is everybody?
We are here.
Because we have to be
we are alone,
and not alone
living,
in spite of it all
and loving,
because of it all
Paradoxical.
Making dinner,
keeping house
waiting for a knock that might never come
But if it does
may we remember what it was like
to feel at home.
May we throw open the door, and say
Hello from planet earth
We’re sorry about the mess