The president of the assembly stood,
Ready to give his speech. He checked a thrill
Which nearly overcame him, for he would
Now accomplish something new; there was still
One frontier, only one, on which man’s will
Had not yet been imposed - destiny had
Chosen him; to shy away would be mad.

“Esteemed peers,” he cooed, “You are now aware,
Surely, of our scientists’ wild surprise,
A shock in which all of us have a share:
Life! In outer space! Right before our eyes!
I shall not waste your time with pretty lies -
The hard truth is, our position is grave:
We’ve our dear Earth and our people to save.”

A worried murmur, according to plan,
Broke out then - a signal of confusion
Which in the right hands (his hands, of course) can
Give credibility to delusion
And bring to life a fearsome illusion,
A terror of no small utility,
All resistance rendered futility.

“My dear patriots of Earth, understand,
I beg you, I come not to cry alarm,
No, but rather merely common sense and
That kind of vigilance which steels the arm
So as to guard our hearth and home ‘gainst harm
And war and slavery and needless pain
And the vile rule of the alien brain.

“Nay! Say I, never! We shall not consign
Our children to languish under hands, claws,
Or hooves of oppressors; they shall not pine
Away, waste away, labor to feed maws
Of monstrous fiends which heed not human laws.
No tentacled tyranny shall hold sway
While one man yet breathes to stand in the way

“Of whatever horrific despot waits,
Biding its time till the moment to spring
Upon us unprepared. Lo! At the gates
A bleak myriad of foes come to sing
Our doom! When sweet freedom ceases to ring
In mankind’s valleys and plains, it will be
A dark day, our darkest; I would not see

“It, personally, given the choice. No,
I for one will not submit to the yoke
Extraterrestrial when there is so
Much yet to be done to save us. No cloak
Lies o’er my words; I speak plainly: I spoke
With clarity of the awful menace
Threat’ning Cairo, Tokyo, Baghdad, Venice,

“Riga, Beijing, New York, Seoul, all the same;
I’ll speak with equal clarity on hope -
The space-bound devil has not won the game,
Not yet; our hands aren’t bound by Martian rope,
Not yet; we’re not yet forced to merely cope;
For if we’re brave, they’ll find, meeting our ire,
That man’s first and last invention was fire.”

Now the delegate of the Holy See,
His eyes wide, his face flushed, raised his hand, rose,
And offered: “Esteemed peers, it seems to me
That we move too fast to so quickly close
The case on this matter as though the woes
Suggested by our president were now
Presently among us! I don’t see how

“We are prevented from supposing that
Our strange new neighbors are lovers of peace;
How are we obliged to dream he grows fat
On the bones of the innocent? Increase
Your lens, widen your minds; war without cease
Is inevitable only if he,
The alien, quite un-alien, be

“So near to us as to think only from
Within the confines of man’s warlike heart,
Marching to the dread beat of our own drum.
Be wise, be men, play the peacemaker’s part.”
The assembly roared him down. They would cart
Him out, they’d have none of it; this was no
Place for men of God; the rule Divine so

Providentially governing the Earth
And Heaven above had only control
Over mankind and the place of our birth;
Space, foreign stars, the void, seemed then to pull
Down all blessèd sovereignty and give full
Force of reality to fearsome Hell,
The tyranny articulated well

By the president suddenly made real
And final in all of those assembled:
A black kingdom of fear which they could feel,
A blind hatred of all that resembled
Not men of Earth; the hall shook and trembled
As with one voice the assembly took up
The chant: “Burn them! Burn them all! Burn them up!”

As they chanted, far away, on pink sands,
Dancing in the light of a silver moon,
Cheers and clapping of ethereal hands
Of a people who, not realizing soon
That they, folk who laugh, weep, learn, sing, call, swoon,
And wax poetic no less than clay men,
Would be born and die no more, marked that then

Festival was begun, a feast of light
Inaugurated here to celebrate
A sacred dawn for a people who might
Have been able to, were it not too late,
Compose a psalm to overthrow hate,
Intoning a verse to dash chains that bind,
And drawing to unity those who’d find

Solidarity, fraternity, all
Those things which make harmony and life sweet;
But alas! For these poor ones who would call
All creatures brethren, they with dancing feet
Would an extinction all untimely meet,
Pondering aloud, all childlike, “Surely
This fiery dawn is breaking too early?”