After Sunshine

It was a summer evening

Professor Caspar’s research done

And from his laboratory window

He looked at the setting sun.

And by him sat his Wilhelmine

Assistant and also concubine.

She saw her lover’s wrinkling

Brow contract as he frowned

And sighed for instead of making love

All night he’d run a thought to ground.

She spoke to ask what idea he’d found

In case he was eager to expound.

Professor Caspar looked down at the girl

And up at the roseate western sky

Then the learned man shook his head

“It’s my wish with wings to fly;

To leave behind the chains of gravity

And sail through the boundless starry sea.

“I look at that swollen sun

As each evening it goes to bed;

And a thought goes round and round

Inside my elegant erudite head.

‘Twould be a great idea,” said he

“To visit that orb, it seems to me.”

“Tell me how you plan to do it,”

Lovely Wilhelmine she cries

As she looks up at her genius lover

With adoring cowlike eyes.

“Tell me how we’d go to the sun

And just what we’re looking for.”

“It is their cowardice,” the Professor cried

“That puts the men of science to rout

For when they think of voyaging there

The heat knocks them all right out.

For iron would run like water,” said he

“By the shores of a solar sea.

“My brain’s too keen for these scientist-men

Round and round theirs go in vain

I got the solution in a moment’s thought

While they sat and argued again.

And while they cower in stupid fright

We’ll go to the sun at night.”

With blood and metal they made a craft

As high as it was wide

And furnished it with food and air

To last them all through the ride.

Caspar took cushions for his captain’s chair

His lover a comb, to mind her hair.

Great was the sight when they rose up

On a column of smoke and fire

And half the bigwigs at the universities

Took to their beds with envious ire.

“They’ll fail though,” the others said

“The sun will toast them like a slice of bread.”

“Now we must find,” Caspar said

“A comet near the sun

On its other side, in its shadow

We’ll make our historic run.

For you know, the sunlight bright

Will make a comet’s shadow, and that’s called night.”

So they found a comet large

Caspar named it after his lady fair

For, he said, its tail was as pretty

As his lover’s well-combed hair.

She, the maiden, smiled and sighed

And hoped they’d get back home unfried.

Then they spun round the swollen sun

And looked into its lambent flame

But the comet’s shadow kept safe and cool

The intrepid professor and his valiant dame.

“I see faces,” the Professor cried

His eyes staring wonder-wide.

Wilhelmine took the telescope

From his unresisting hands

And the lady looked her fill

At the sun’s unknown lands.

She saw flame-men, and women too

As real and live as I or you.

“One of them,” she gasped aloud

In the craft’s cushioned space –

“Looks just like me, and she’s staring back

Right into my own little face.”

“Just like you?” the Professor griped

And then a moment his brow he wiped.

“But they’re shameless,” Wilhelmine said

And frowned and shook her well-combed head;

“They wear no clothes, and do out about

What decent people do in bed.

And of all of them, that woman there

Is most wanton, as well as bare.”

The woman in the sun then smiled

And a kissy-face she made

As though she knew her beauty’s flame

Put the human woman right to shade.

“I could have ten thousand men like that

But they’d fry like bacon fat.”

Caspar sighed and turned from the beauty there

Looked at the lady by his side

And something in her face made him

Ask her right then to be his bride.

For ‘twas better to make her wife

Than feel the edge of her kitchen knife.

“Of course I will,” the maiden said

With a tight-lipped little smile

As though she’d been waiting for this moment

For months and years, all this while.

“Of course I will, but you better turn

Us back homeward, lest we burn.”

The comet sped on past the sun

And in the course of passing time

They came back to near the earth

And celebrated with a gin and lime.

Then they kissed once, and came on down

Landed back in their little town.

Great fame then the Professor won

And of course the Lady Wilhelmine

But the scientists wondered why she kept

A blade with her shining keen,

And why, though his fame was bright

She only let Caspar out at night.

Copyright B Purkayastha 2016

[This is, of course, a parody of Robert Southey’s After Blenheim. But any close passage to the sun will have to be done, as described, at night, that is, in the shadow of some astronomical object.]

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