Fay Roberts’s penultimate sonnet this year is inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s epic, surreal sci-fi classic, the USAmerican movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), written by Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, and starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester, and Douglas Rain.
In pain, this late, I don’t know if I’ll last;
I tried to read the book when I was wee.
(my television’s not exactly vast)
it’s not the way he wanted us to see…
This fearful symmetry, this awful drone;
intelligence is warfare, death on hand?
And what’s a stylus but a sharpened bit of bone
rotating, waiting for the right to land?
The choir shrills their harsh, triumphant skirls,
the people decorations, afterthoughts
(the future’s white, and all the servants girls)
a way to highlight scale, the plot for naught…
As splendid isolation is the way
this final human touch calls it a day.
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| Image from Wikipedia |
If you have access to Prime Video, you can watch the 2:29 long, English language movie here. Content warnings include: violence, flashing lights, murder. Let us know what you thought if you’ve seen it! Maybe don’t watch it knackered and in lots of pain, though, unless you enjoy obsessing over tapirs in a sleep-deprived state… And conception metaphors…
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