Q is for quiet

(This post is part of the 2013 Blogging From A to Z April Challenge. Learn more about the Challenge HERE. It's also part of National Poetry Writing Month. Learn more about NaPoWriMo HERE.)

Twilight Grace

We drift now in the quiet space,
the black between the stars,
Engines torn away months ago
by an errant cosmic string
or some unexpected particle.

No rescue possible. No engines, no
highspace communications. Command
cannot find us. In this vast empiness,
another warpship lighting on this tiny
point of nothing beggars imagination.

Most of the crew now dead or missing.
The doctor drank poison; captain
fled to his quarters with a bottle.
The engineer nurses our life support;
he says mad things about what he sees.

I wander the arboretum ring. Alone
except for the green plants whose
names I never learned. I touch their
leaves. I water the green rows.
The flowers turn blind faces.

This is the last log of the warpship
Twilight Grace. Listen oh listen
to me. At times, I can hear moans,
shuffling footsteps in the corridors;
but no one answers when I call ...

(Copyright 2013 by Stephen B. Bagley.  From the forthcoming Undying: Poems of Fantasy & Science Fiction. All rights reserved. No copying without express written permission.)