Otherworlds

This poem was written in response to an exhibit of Australian aboriginal art at the Chazen Museum. What struck me was the absence of defining borders between the physical world and the dreaming world, between the animate and inanimate, between humans and animals and geographies and gods.

Photo by Dino Reichmuth on Unsplash

Otherworlds

The days are almost gone
when we could dream ourselves
seamlessly into the sky
when the gods wandered
living among us
in human and animal shapes
bristles scales feathers
flecked and speckled skins.

Once there were paths
back and forth between
dry earth and starstruck night
rivers of legend through rock
charged current flowing
wave water rain
falling from elsewhere
tapped from a divine well.

Ancestral tales are interwoven
a mesh of fine lines
carrying information
spools of stored knowledge
unwinding through generations
leaf stem root seed
strings of energy in space
reach out to a billion planets.

by F. J. Bergmann

F. J. Bergmann lives in Wisconsin and fantasizes about tragedies on or near exoplanets. Her work has appeared in Abyss & Apex, Analog, Asimov’s SF, and elsewhere in the alphabet. She is a Grand Master of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association. She thinks imagination can compensate for anything.