STORY - "The field of beetroot."
By Les Murray
Les Murray is a Krambach parishioner and poet.

A friend of mine in Wales once told me with gloomy relish about a modern Scandinavian long poem in which a whole human population is being carried in a vast spaceship to settle a new planet far, far away.

The ship's navigation system has failed, and all are doomed to die on their way to nowhere in the dark void. I grinned at the morbid imagery of meaninglessness and death, and something helped me to reply that the poem had become obsolete.

Pope John Paul and Lech Walesa had unscrewed a panel off the ship's bow and shown it to be fixed to a huge pylon in the middle of a large field of beetroot.

It was indeed going nowhere, and all the people climbed down out of it and went home.

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