This poem is a reprise of my earlier poem ‘Ode to the Pale Blue Dot’. The ‘pale blue dot’ is a term given to the image of planet Earth – our home – from 3.8 billion miles away (taken by Voyager 1 as it left our solar system in 1990). In his famous commentary on this image Carl Sagan said ‘in our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves’. Sagan was an atheist but as a leading astronomer he was profoundly aware of humanity’s insignificance in the cosmos, and pleaded for a renewed humility and tolerance. Meditating on the pale blue dot might give cause for such humility, and from a theistic point of view, it can make us marvel that God actually bothers with us…
Why does God bother
With a breed of truculent ingrates,
Perched on this wee planet
Like an angry mob on a prison roof?
We infight and despoil our world
As if it belonged to us!
A sizeable asteroid could finish us,
If we don’t do it first.
Myopic and prideful,
We slaughter for a scrap of this orb,
And that for the briefest span
Of hegemony and power!
All earth’s empires become
As dust and dried up fossils,
And human striving amounts
To a short run theatrical.
We love what is futile,
And we seek what is false.
We forsake soaring eternity,
For fifteen minutes’ fame.
We are childish instead of childlike,
And Abba regards every step.
Why does God bother?
Any good parent can tell you.