I’m walking by the dimming remains
of a building of future past:
its once stylish streetlight, now decayed,
points at the Moon that’s rising fast.
The old streetlight was made of globes of glass
that circle its core of steel bars.
It looks like a starship, sleek and fast,
but now its globes are dusty and scarred.
The globes, a circle of eight bright moons,
orbit the streetlight’s tall spire
that points up to the glowing sky jewel,
to the place to which it aspires.
Up there, on brightly lit lunar plains,
our spacefarers once walked in awe
and dreamt of Zarathustra’s booming strains
in two thousand and one proud hurrahs.
And so this spacecraft of glass globes
was made to look up to the stars,
to urge us on to launch further probes
and take wing from this blue globe of ours.
Years later, this dream has faded
to fleeting stars of reality shows,
who leave the people fixated —
not by the Moon’s, but by screens’ dim glow.
The streetlight was fixed firmly to earth,
iron bolted to grey crumbling concrete.
But it still points up to the heavenly berth:
Moon rises, a dream left on repeat.
Inspired by a streetlight at the now decaying 1970s futuristic International Congress Center in Berlin.
