And again!
a little bit more and i should be done. hopefully not for 3 weeks this time.
this is another sci-fi type of piece, but very different. i’ve had the opening line on a list of proposed story titles for a couple of years, and just could never make it fit anywhere. a while back i played with the idea of turning it into a poem, and then later a villanelle, which is the current form. i still think there is a larger story here, which i will eventually write. my latest idea is of an editorial piece for a fictional newspaper– a father printing the last words of his son who bravely went off into the cosmos for research or military duty or something.
oh, the tragedy:
Bury me where the cyberlilies grow
In their light my grave will always be seen
Leave me at peace where they will always glow
Between the sidewalk cracks on Mercury’s Skid Row
Underground streetlights next to android trees
Bury me where the cyberlilies grow
On Venus, where lightening is the only light they know
The water is scarce but the sorrow is free
Leave me at peace where they will always glow
Searchlights in the night across the red plains of Mars show
That even the fugitives cower in the dark on bent knee
Bury me where the cyberlilies grow
Near Saturn’s wharf, the cloudships flow
Down to the ebb and tide of the petroleum sea
Leave me at peace where they will always glow
There is no light past Omega outpost, on Pluto
Nor as far beyond as our sensors can see
Bury me where the cyberlilies grow
Leave me at peace where they will always glow
(BTW, for those who might be writing nerds in the audience, no, this is probably not the EXACT villanelle format. the stanza configuration and the rhyme scheme are correct, but there is no particular uniform meter to the lines. the jury seems to be out on what the “traditional” meter should be, so i decided to bag it.)
Now, to bring it back around to the idea of this blog: I have no idea what a cyberlily would look like. it’s just something that literally popped into my head one day (sounds like tiger lily) 
. so obviously i would love to see what Q comes up with for the visual. just as much, however, i picture cyberlilies growing in fields on harsh planets where nothing else will grow. i would love to see what a field of blue-glowing, metal flowers would look like in the green atmosphere of Venus at sunrise.
Q, of course, has no obligation to draw anything that i say, but these are the things that i think about.