The Interstellar Archaeologist and Librarian

I am the interstellar archaeologist and librarian, a job not trite.
I fly over terra firma like a mischievous sprite.
I have taken images with my advanced telephoto optics.
My vision across millennia has been panoptic.
I saw Cleopatra in her bath of asses’ milk.
I saw Caesar on the Ides of March;
Alexander, Ptolemy, and others of that ilk.
I saw the Seven Wonders of the World:
the Colossus of Rhodes,
the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus,
the Lighthouse at Alexandria, a splendid sight;
the Great Pyramids of Giza representing Egypt’s might;
the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, a wondrous feast of the Near East;
the statue of Zeus at Olympia and the temple of Artemis, both exemplars.
All these journeys so pervasive remind me
that going back to my mother planet is like Orpheus’ descent.
I would re-enter the atmosphere almost spent.
I would shiver and shake as I acclimatised to the new conditions.
I would recount my knowledge and experience
to an army of scribes with great erudition.
But I was forever full of wanderlust.
I shall cry bitterly when an asteroid finally renders the Earth to dust.
Planet Earth has always had me in its thrall,
Even if now my main job is inspecting relics
and the human reception of archaeology and the classical world,
and the glory days are gone, like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
But until the asteroid heralds the closing curtain,
I must reiterate a point most certain:
until that happens, I shall go on capturing, cataloguing, archiving,
like a coin from the mint;
an exhausting, edifying, illuminating stint.