Clone

Is Medical Science going too far...

It is not ours to seek to trace

The fall of man, the sharp descent

The sense of some long-lived disgrace

That long-forgotten Man has felt.

 

Long toppled from some petty star

He called his own, when he began

To call ambition to his aid,

Abandoned God, and worshipped Man.

 

Brief glimpses only come to mind

Of all we were before the spade

Of Man’s misfortune spat the sand

On all achievement’s shallow grave.

 

Before the morning rooster crowed

The end of all the time we had,

The end of chances lost in space

In time, in trust, and lost in sand.

 

Too late to call forgiveness down

On tortured heads that cry ‘repent’

When all the ashes of our kind

Are littered on the sunny strand

 

Of all that man has built, preserved,

Admired, desired, or bought and sold

Until the stone itself has tired

And crumbled back to dust alone.

 

‘The King is dead - long live the King’

Shall not be heard again from us

Whose litter washes at the breach

Of all we learnt and tried to teach.

 

The tales were false, the stories told

Were rank injustice, chafing at

The bit of truth we’d lost before

We knew what leash we’d settled for.

 

But as the shade of death denies

The spark of life its next sunrise,

So knowledge, squandered in the search

For life eternal, in disguise

 

Destroyed what little life we had…

Poetic justice, if you like,

And all that we, in fact, deserve;

Eternal life is God’s preserve!

 

David Lewis Paget