Poem: "Transplanting Gramps"
This poem came from the February 5, 2013 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from DW user Chordatesrock. It has been sponsored by Anthony & Shirley Barrette. This poem belongs to the series An Army of One: The Autistic Secession in Space.
Transplanting Gramps
He wasn't in the army.
He wasn't young and able-bodied
like the secessionists who had been in the army.
He wasn't even a veteran,
like a few who had moved into the Lacuna,
although he had his own memories of the war,
as layered and pungent as the skin of an onion.
He was of the same mind as them
and he brought with him
decades of experience in that,
rather than any unique and brilliant skill
like the various specialists who made up
most of the secessionist population.
That was why
he uprooted himself
and moved to the Lacuna,
even though he presumably had
only a few years left in his life.
"You're all whippersnappers,"
he said to the bright young things
who met him in the landing bay,
staring at him with wide eyes and open mouths.
"You can't build a whole society from all the same folks,
any more than you can build a whole starship
from one box of all the same gears.
You need babies for the future
and old folks for the past,
so here I am."
They were uncertain
where to plant him because
there was no place for elders in the military,
no role waiting for him to fill it --
except that what he said was true --
they had a narrow age range and maybe
that was causing unexamined problems.
He didn't care where they put him,
and he couldn't magically solve all their problems,
but having Gramps around did make them think
about where they had come from and
what might happen later when
they, themselves, grew old.
Almost unnoticed,
the spiral galaxy of their society
spun slowly through another quarter-turn
into the future.