Ann K. Schwader is a Wyoming native exiled to suburban Colorado, USA. She is the author of Twisted in Dream (Hippocampus Press, 2011), Bram Stoker Award finalist Wild Hunt of the Stars (Sam’s Dot, 2010) and four other collections of speculative poetry. Find out more from her LiveJournal ( http://ankh-hpl.livejournal.com/ ) or at http://home. earthlink.net/~schwader/.
They glittered mystery in the desert night,
those sparks from space we came to know as spores,
but saw at first by childhood’s light: each mind
its own myth-maker. So contagion spread
as evils always have, without intent
beyond some impulse to perfect one’s life.
Humanity’s quixotic quest for life
outside our homeworld orbit stopped that night,
successfully. Forever. By intent
or otherwise, our fate lay with those spores,
drawn deeper with each sleeping breath to spread
their threads of hunger & ensnare the mind.
Why did the notion never come to mind
that loneliness was safer? Surely, life
elsewhere might have its own agenda, spread
itself upon the star-winds until night
exploded with new constellations: spores
enough for legions linked by one intent.
Unceasing motion seemed the sole intent
sustaining the infested. Maimed in mind,
they roved as little more than meat for spores
of future generations. Aping life
no longer theirs, these shamblers by night
soon burst with fruiting death as terror spread.
From continent to continent the spread
accelerated, fuelled by good intent
turned tragic as a shotgun in the night
unthinkingly deployed. Each spattered mind
released in turn its epitaph to life
as we once lived it, innocent of spores.
Adrift in this necropolis where spores
abandoned us at last, survivors spread
a thousand warning satellites for life
that might approach our planet. Yet, intent
undoes us still: each thread-infested mind
cries out in siren welcome to the night.
So life perfects its own malign intent
until the stars are merely spores that spread
in mindless currents to the curve of night.