The Astravore

Oh earth, beware!
You should prepare
To cower before
The Astravore.

With fearsome scowl
And thund’rous growl,
The Astravore
Keeps wanting more.

His hungry face
Roves large through space.
How men deplore
The Astravore!

He’ll munch a sun
And when he’s done,
The Astravore
Spits out the core.

His habits make
Star systems quake.
You won’t ignore
The Astravore.

His breath is stale,
Galaxies quail.
The Astravore
Eats planets raw.

Long term schemes
And plans and dreams
Have one great flaw –
The Astravore.

He hears no plea.
You cannot flee
The Astravore
And his great jaw.

He gobbles stars
Like choc’late bars,
Then chews a straw –
The Astravore.

Stop and chat
And chew the fat?
The Astravore
Brooks no rapport.

Some fearful suns
Are building guns
To underscore
The Astravore.

But he’ll win out
Without a doubt.
The Astravore
Will relish war.

Its best, they say,
To creep away.
Discretion, or
The Astravore?

The lie

One night, the stars came floating down
Like paratroopers, bathed in light.
They fell on countryside and town
And fields and roofs were clothed in white,
Cold starflakes silent as the night.

They say the moon came down as well
And landed near Trincomalee
And natives set off through the swell
To where they thought that it should be,
But it had sunk beneath the sea.

Three days the starfall cloaked the earth
And then it slowly turned to slush
Till soon there wasn’t tuppenceworth
Between Portrush and Hindu Kush.
And then there fell a deathly hush

As all the world looked up and saw
The inside of a jet-black dome.
No pinpricks twinkling as before –
Just us, squashed in our dismal home,
Our squalid, lonely hippodrome.

And then, when realisation hit,
We marched upon the college gates
With oil-swabbed torches brightly lit
And flung them on mendacious slates
And blocked the doors with burning crates.

And to the media too, for they
Had propagated all those lies.
No mercy. By the light of day
Those bastards were cut down to size,
No more to gloat and moralise.

And then the churches and the banks
And Government buildings and the shops.
We razed the world in armoured tanks
And burnt out forests, deserts, crops,
Then set ablaze the mountain tops.

And soon the whole world was on fire
And night time was no longer black
And raucous voices formed a choir,
As choking ash rained down like flak.
Alone. There could be no way back.