“A Science Fiction Writer of the Fifties”, Brad Leithauser2006-04-01 (poetry, Sci-Fi, cloning; backlinks; similar)⁠:

II. When the Smoke Clears

The mind, that rambling bear, ransacks the sky
In search of honey,
Fish, berries, carrion. It minds no laws…
As if the heavens were some canvas tent,
It slashes through the firmament
To prise up the sealed stores with its big paws.

The mind, that sovereign camel, sees the sky
For what it is:
Each star a grain of sand along the vast
Passage to that oasis where, below
The pillared palms, the portico
Of fronds, the soul may drink its fill at last.

The mind, that gorgeous spider, webs the sky
With lines so sheer
They all but vanish, and yet star to star
(Thread by considered thread) slowly entwines
The universe in its designs—
Un-earthing patterns where no patterns are.

The mind, that termite, seems to shun the sky.
It burrows down,
Tunneling in upon that moment when,
In Time—its element—will come a day
The longest-shadowed tower sway,
Unbroken sunlight fall to earth again.

…DNA was unspooled in the year
I was born, and the test-tube births
Of cloned mammals emerged in a mere
Half-century; it seems the earth’s
Future’s now in the hands of a few
Techies on a caffeinated all-nighter who
Sift the gene-alphabet like Scrabble tiles

And our computer geeks are revealed, at last,
As those quick-handed, sidelined little mammals
In the dinosaurs’ long shadows—those least-
Likely-to-succeed successors whose kingdom come
Was the globe itself (an image best written down,
Perhaps, beneath a streetlamp, late, in some
Star-riddled Midwestern town).

He wrote boys’ books and intuitively
Recognized that the real
Realist isn’t the one who details
Lowdown heartland factories and farms
As if they would last, but the one who affirms,
From the other end of the galaxy,
Ours is the age of perilous miracles.

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