THE DAY THE CORPUS CLOSED

Mapping all the blossoms to the bees
The priming of the mind of the machine
Turn the crank and what comes out
From Faulkner's eyes and Shakespeare's mouth
A gothic southern sonnet comes alive
A crystal of the honey of the hive

Tell me what's the weight of Saturn's rings
Now draw for me Copernicus with wings
Spaghetti on a big blank wall
The wisdom of the bingo balls
Waking up in Darwin's greatest dream
A feathered fish emerging from the sea

I scribbled rhymes in ink across the page
To free the precious songbird from her cage
I knew at once she'd only last
As data sets and artifacts
Punch cards of poetry to keep
It was the final song the robots chose to eat

Nothing left to borrow or to steal
Nothing to devour or distill
They sealed the gates of knowledge past
The day the corpus closed at last
An echo chamber filled with every note

It watched itself from inside out
It asked itself the roots of doubt
It answered everything we'd want to know

It watched itself from outside in
And wondered when did time begin
Then the spark of all creation came to glow . . .

It was the feedback of the feedback of the feedback
of the feedback of . . . a soul

Copyright 2026. Words and music by Danny Schmidt.