Ozymandias

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.