Post Syndicated from The Codeless Code original http://thecodelesscode.com/case/234
The nun Hwídah has composed this uncharacteristically
somber sonnet for your contemplation:
I chanced upon an ancient cache of code:
a stack of printouts, tall as any man,
that in decaying boxes had been stowed.
Ten thousand crumbling pages long it ran.
Abandoned in the blackness to erode,
what steered a ship through blackness to the moon.
The language is unused in this late year.
The target hardware, likewise, lies in ruin.
Entombed within one lone procedure’s scope,
a line of code and then these words appear:# TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE
The code beside persisting to the last—
as permanent as aught upon this sphere—
while overhead, a vacant moon flies past.
Editor’s note
Inspired by this story of the Apollo Guidance Computer code for Apollo 11,
and
this code within,
and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias of course.
I tried to keep to Shelley’s unusual (and non-standard)
rhyme scheme for the sonnet, but I departed from it in the
second-to-last line for poetic reasons. For a language
which excels in stealing words from other cultures, English
has an appalling lack of rhymes.