Failed Enterprise Poem by Mary Champion

So, which came first -the Big Bang or the egg?

In metaphorical fact, it went thus:
first -Humpty Dumpty tumbles from the wall
and is smashed into a billion pieces.
Each piece becomes a subject of concern.

Astronomy, astrology and art,
biochemistry beauty, boardgames,
cosmology, catastrophe, and crime,
death, destruction and determinism

and so-on, through the cosmic alphabet,
not forgetting war, and laughter and dreams,
meaning and purpose and metallurgy,
altruism, cruelty and madness.

But who is there to be concerned with these -
the shattered fragments of poor Humpty's fall?
Primeval slime is unconcerned with truth
and even higher life forms can't be arsed.

Who is there to wonder and ask questions?
Where is the mind that yearns to understand?
Life must spend millennia evolving
until, in time, the thinking man is born.

At last, the naked ape can stand erect
and speculate about the confusion
that's scattered around him in abundance.
Propelled by some blind instinct to explain,

his preferred option is analysis -
divide and obsessively specialise -
each area examined more closely
with a myopic, laser-focussed gaze.

But some minds, not well suited to science,
can still wonder and question with the best.
They survey the creation around them
with their increasingly critical eyes.

They decide that Nature needs improvement
and they are the animals to do it.
For millennia they struggle with it -
tweaking here, twiddling there - making ‘progress'.

Growing ever more wildly ambitious,
decide that it needs a complete rewrite.
They install their ill-considered upgrades,
divorce themselves from their bestial roots,

heedlessly, recklessly they go for broke
and desperately they head for the stars.
But, like Icarus, they fly far too close
and the whole thing blows up in their faces.

What of poor dismembered Humpty Dumpty -
each fragment now inspected and explained?
Sadly, understanding is still lacking
and no one synthesises all his parts.

*

Long vanished and fading from memory,
since all the king's men's struggles came to naught.
His epitaph should be recorded thus -
'Man made AI and made himself extinct.'