Day Thirty: "Elegy"
Elegy -for Rod Serling In the future on a planet far from home, there is a likeness of you, gesturing in your suit and black tie. A slight glint of humor softens your worn face and rough voice as you hover in mid-step through a door or around a corner, cigarette in hand, to introduce every story and provide a small homily at its end, a wry reminder of human depravity and a call to be better, to learn. You try to teach me not to forget the horrors of my history. And sometimes you simply haunt me: with strange faces hovering outside a plane window or above an operating table, fears of memory and the uncanny waiting in the past and future, within varied apocalypses and the unmarked ninth floor of a department store. You have given me the uncanny, the lonely made whole, the parables, quests for youth both vain and gentle, the acceptance of death. And as you gesture onward endlessly alongside the three astronauts in this story, whose only wish was to return to earth, I hope you appreciat