Looking down

Was it Arthur C. Clarke

who called Earth a pale blue dot?

Isaac Asimov?

Carl Sagan? 

I think it was Carl Sagan.

Did all of them think it and just one of them said it first?

Whoever said it was right.

Up here in the starship 

looking down,

it’s becoming clearer and clearer

to me that while Earth might have

at one time

been that pale blue dot,

it isn’t any longer.

From way up here,

floating in an organic metal ship,

the Earth looks like a caricature of itself.

Some funhouse mirror reflection

of what it once was,

at one time whole and beautiful,

supporting 

those who lived

in harmony with their surroundings.

I remember those years ago when the ship

first came and

the Travellers

first picked me up,

they were curious about humans.

They wondered why

we did all the things we did.

I told them—

like I am some kind of expert—

that we mostly had no clue

what we were doing.

Some of us try

to live the right way,

the slow way,

the long way,

the way that lets as much flourish at the same time as possible; 

at the same time,

there is the threat of being

crushed

under the boot heels

of those who want everything

now,

who want everything 

their way,

who want to build an altar upon which they can

sacrifice everything

to themselves.

The Travellers asked me what I thought

sacrifice meant

and I told them

I thought it meant to give things up for the greater good

and they told me

I was close.

The Travellers told me

sacrifice means to take something mundane

and to

put our energy into it and doing so makes it sacred.

They told me 

what they saw 

was human sacrifice

to gods of our own creation.

The Travellers told me

they’d been watching humans

for years—

THEIR concept of years—

and found all kinds of people believed

all kinds of wild ideas,

but no one wanted to

really believe something that isn’t their god

could be looking back down

and judging them.