Some Frost for a Frosty Day

The chance is the remotest
Of its going much longer unnoticed
That I'm not keeping pace
With the headlong human race

And some of them may mind
My staying back behind
To take life at a walk
In philosophic talk;

Though as yet they only smile
At how slow I do a mile,
With tolerant reproach
For me as an Old Slow Coach.

But I know them what they are:
As they get more nuclear
And more bigoted in reliance
On the gospel of modern science,

For them my loitering around
At less than the speed of sound
Or even the speed of light
Won't seem unheretical quite.

They may end by banishing me
To the penal colony
They are thinking of pretty soon
Establishing on the moon.

With a can of condensed air
I could go almost anywhere,
Or rather submit to be sent
As a noble experiment.

They should try one wastrel first
On a landscape so accursed
To see how long they should wait
Before they make it a state.

"Some Science Fiction"
Robert Frost