Waltz of the 101st Lightborne
lyrics as sung on Divers
I believed they had got what they came for;
I believed our peril was done,
on the eve of the last of the Great Wars,
after three we had narrowly won.
(But the fourth,
it was carelessly done.)
Saw his ship in its whistling ascension,
as they launched from the Capitol seat—
swear I saw our mistake
when the clouds draped like a flag,
across the backs of the fleet
of the Hundred-First Lightborne Elite.
As the day is long,
so the well runs dry,
and we came to see Time is taller
than Space is wide.
And we bade goodbye
to the Great Divide:
found unlimited simulacreage to colonize!
But there was a time we were lashed to the prow
of a ship you may board, but not steer,
before You and I ceased to mean Now,
and began to mean only Right Here
(to mean Inches and Miles, but not Years);
before Space had a taste of its limits,
and a new sort of coordinate awoke,
making Time just another poor tenant:
bearing weight, taking fire, trading smokes,
in the war between us and our ghosts.
(But I saw the Bering Strait and the Golden Gate,
in silent suspension of their golden age!
And you can barely tell, if I guard it well,
where I have been, and seen,
pristine, unfelled.)
And I had a dream that I walked in the garden
of Chabot, and those telescope ruins.
It was there that I called to my true love,
who was pale as millennial moons,
Honey, where did you come by that wound?
When I woke, he was gone
and the War had begun,
in eternal return and repeat.
Calling, Where in the hell are the rest of your fellow
One Hundred-One Lightborne Elite?
stormed in the New Highland Light Infantry.
Make it stop, my love!
We were wrong to try.
Never saw what we could unravel,
in traveling light,
or how the trip debrides—
like a stack of slides!
All we saw was that Time is taller than Space is wide.
That's why we got bound to a round desert island,
'neath the sky where our sailors have gone.
Have they drowned, in those windy highlands?
Highlands away, my John.