Selling Starlight

Evolved far beyond the stone knives and bearskins
that we humans so enthusiastically flaunt
as twenty-first century technology,
The Gloss, beings inhabiting
another spiral arm of the galaxy,
specialize in building Dyson Spheres,
mega-structures that completely surround stars.
Thus, they capture every single photon of starlight.
The Gloss, then, profit to the ultimate illumination of
their accomplishment, by selling that starlight.

Their ships far transcend the meager conveyances
that we have placed upon the doorstep of space,
ships that would confound, amaze, and, yes,
even frighten us, just as our technology
would be as God-feared to Neanderthals.
For their ships transport the captured starlight
to other worlds where light is essential life elixir,
supplied as sustenance by these space-faring profiteers
to ward off any cessation of the sentient, the brutal finality
that is the hindmost bitterness of extinction.

They shuttle in measured luminescence, The Gloss,
down to crevice and corner by their reason, down to skim
routines claiming fame for their well-kept light of star,
uncannily at ease in loud showmanship,
a proclivity of broad smile
in a labyrinth of otherworldly need,
effortless in focus, hawking harvested light.
These bringers of light set price in thin nonchalance,
yet then impromptu negotiations erupt like energy
preening upon the flaring of gamma ray burst.

Starlight, that inestimable commodity
functioning as both wavelength and particle,
that visitation of fusion reaction now in elegant
harvest by superintendents of dazzle-nimbus speed,
a luminous on-raging whirl flashing white
the inner walls of a dodecahedron tank--
that is now sold by those who call themselves The Gloss,
with aplomb and with elegance, with the tendering
of unabashed profit and with a deep inner need
to always relegate the darkness.

40 Lines