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.