The Second Song of the Songstress

The Balloon Men

Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?

The lipsticked smile of the songstress grew and grew

until it filled the whole of ICU.

In helium-pitched voice, the giantess

began a caberet to sing. “Mein Kanzler,

since you now have ample time to spare,

I have a little tale about a balloon to tell.

A moral tale of bulldog spirit and derring-do

no less, Mein Kanzler, specially for you.

‘Twas in the days of yore when gentleman

adventurers took to the skies in huge un-navigable

balloons filled with hot air. Neither the dirigiste state

of Emperor Napoleon the Third nor Paris Communards

could ground the exploits of those valiant entrepreneurs.

Up, up into the clouds they flew, like Captain Kirk,

or Socrates in the Nephelai. Away over

the poppy-littered fields of foreign lands they soared,

until that basketful of portly gents began

to sink under the surfeit of their weight

into a no-mans-land. The natives shook their spears

in fearful anger at these floundering Übermenschen

in their devilish machines. Our heroes therefore,

calculists to a man, booted the mechanism

of their brains right up as far as it would go,

and tossed the weakest and least useful of their flock,

measured by sure parameters, out onto

the points of waiting weapons below. The beery,

bald, bigoted, and flat-footed, and the oafish

bully, along with moaning minnies, one by one

were coldly offered to the merciless justice

meted out by the laws of gravity and natural

selection of the herd, until there were none left,

Mein Kanzler, only the pretty colored fabric

of the balloon to flit deflating on the air

and sigh out its last breath. And there the story ends.

There is, however, just a little postscript

to this tale. For those upon the ground, their minds

befuddled by the ill-boding omen in the sky

and star-men tumbling earthwards out of heaven

like rain, turned, in their warlike superstition,

upon each other’s throats in mutually-assured

self-slaughter, leaving the land a waste of ash

ready for nature to begin her work afresh.

I walk, a modern Noah, in the mind’s eye

of my childlike imagination around

this post-apocalyptic scene devoid

of human stain and chance upon a single

multicolored bloom that’s not yet gone and offer

that pretty fading flower, Dear Chancellor, to you.

Photo by ian dooley on Unsplash