how awfully strange it is

how foreign you feel in my mind’s eye

this was death both acute and chronic

a snapped neck and slowest suffocation

the last blip of a dying civilization 

final radio waves like stragglers 

across the vacuum of space,

an SOS heard far too late —

the subtlest instruments,

of time-traveling ears,

hearing ancient echoes,

that traveled lightyears —

from utmost familiarity,

to a stranger —

a face obscured 

by the fogs of time —