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There is a cat In Goddard Space Flight Center And I don't know How it got past the guards Or squeezed through a gap In the chain link fence Or perhaps was brought hither By some misguided Human To prowl through the snowy forest To stalk luckless squirrels And birds benumbed by the cold. While we Snug in brick-faced strongholds Build fluxgate magnetometers To probe distant Jupiter, Saturn And heterodyne photon detectors To analyze chemical fragments Where no life could ever endure To further extend human knowledge To probe space and ever learn more. The cat, too, Has exquisite sensors Green eye-slits the better to see you with Sharp claws the better to pounce on you The software and hardware of nature Integrated to a perfection. And one hundred years may have gone by The buildings are gone and decayed Our marvelous clever achievements Are in the textbooks. They are the stuff Schoolchildren study for tests And never ask why, or how come-- The book says so, it must be true. The chain fence is mere rusty powder Only the trees are the same The trees and the snow And the cat Crafty dark hunter of feather and fur Stalking--as it always has done.
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Author and Curator: Dr. David P. Stern
Mail to Dr.Stern: david("at" symbol)phy6.org .
Last updated 15 May 2002