Recent news indicates that there are upward of 400 billion stars, a management problem, even for God. Where on earth do you start?

When God Lost the Planet

Each day unfurled
Another world!
God sits up there and gently nurses
Spanking, brand new universes.

Purblinding flash!
Oh, boom and crash!
A zillion atoms spun in space.
Where did they fly? Some place, some place.

For thirteen billion years, we’re told,
Did God his galaxies unfold
With neutron stars and cosmic rays.
Thus did God spend timeless days.

For goodness sake,
One needs a break.
Even those with mighty power
Like to relax for half an hour.

He thinks a thought!
Just what he sought
To liven up the daily grind – –
He has a unique scheme in mind!

Aha! Ambition!
Matchless mission – –
A scheme to create a race of men
With ethics and with acumen!

Experiment
Was his intent.
“I’ll pick a rock of random worth,
And, ah! I’ll call the planet “Earth”!

“And at its birth
I’ll make this Earth
As beauteous as an April sonnet
And place my new creations on it.”

“They’ll look like me
Be good like me.
And every man will love his wife,
And thank me for his daily life!”

And so it was, and in a trice
God created paradise,
And placed in it a married pair,
A test to see how they would fare.

But space expands
If left unplanned.
A planet whirls away in space,
And nothing’s left to fill the space.

Space grew too vast,
And God at last,
Taking years to get around,
Discovered Earth could not be found.

Thus men are left
On Earth, bereft,
Without a God to tell them “nay”,
Lost amidst the Milky Way.

It’s rather rare
To sit up there,
And even in ten billion years,
To lose a planet in the spheres.

“Oh, huge mistake
For me to make!
Where is that H2O and granite?
Where is my chosen little planet?

“Oh! Fractured hope!
How will they cope,
Lost in the vast ethereal sphere
Gripped by suspicion, greed and fear?

“Oh, doom, oh, gloom.
Not I? Then whom?
Who will be there to keep them moral,
To teach them how to love, not quarrel?

God searches here,
He searches there,
On moons, black dwarfs, dark energy,
But not a human could He see.

“Ah! Infinitesimal speck!
Hey, what the heck?
If men on Earth possess a flaw
Forget it! I’ll just make some more.

And thus time passed
Until at last,
While rambling through a group of stars,
Why, Earth appeared, alongside Mars.

Ah! Eureka!
Planet seeker!
He cried, “Aha, that’s where they’ve gone!
Let’s see how they are getting on.”

Amazed, He found his two creations
Had spawned a multitude of nations.
No one thought or spoke the same,
Or, if in the wrong, would take the blame.

“Jehovah! Lord!
(With one accord!)
We’re glad you’ve come as prophesied!
We thought we’d see you when we died”.

So saying, men
Proceeded then
To pepper God like proper pests
With thousands of inane requests.

Most were self-seeking,
Falsehood-reeking,
“Bless me, Lord, and kindly strike
And punish those whom I dislike”.

“Oh, God, to whom we genuflect
Mine’s by far the holiest sect.
We praise you more, and they are weird.
What’s more, we wear a longer beard”.

And God was pained
When people claimed
He’d picked upon a chosen few
And helped them win a war or two.

And God above
Said “Where is love?
I should have been around to ground ’em,
I rather wish I’d never found ’em”.

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“When God Lost the Planet” is part of a collection of light verse, written by Robert Hanrott and published by ByD Press under the title “The Rueful Hippopotamus”, available from Amazon.com in the US and Amazon.co.uk in the United Kingdom .