This I Remember

This I Remember
Quiet your ceaseless burbling

I am remembering
Let me sit and think
There things happened long ago
Before you or I were born
Within our present boundaries
You are lovely, yes, I know I have said it before
But you are
Nevertheless today I would remember
The night the comets crashed
Above a land that never was
Before the time of yesterday
When gods were mortal as the stars
Yes Yes hush now
While I reminisce
On days the sun shone mottled red
Through clouds of shifting calcium
And threw loose shadows clumsily
Across the dying citadels
It is good to sit in the sun again
And dream of one vast empire manned
By giants who were never men
But builded on an alien world
Colossal monuments that stood
Long aeons ere they crumbled back
And then within a nighted sea
Where phosphorescence glowed and fought
Around the pistons of machines
Whose turbines rolled and rumbled deep
Beneath the braced sea bottom roof
This I remember
A jagged rock careening past
The mellowed sun, with hyperbolic
Arcs athwart its orbit course
Deflected, straight it shot
Into the interstellar space as strange
Dark lichens died again
And wilted back upon its face
This I remember . . . .
— Grady L. McMurtry
(undated)

Note: Originally published in Thelema Lodge Calendar, September 1994.