Mars
I'm watching the long red sunset
Cross over the tawny sky,
As Phobos tumbles past my head
And Deimos, by and by,
The light's beginning to fracture
As darkness reigns instead,
While Sylvie shakes her long blond hair
As she leaves her fretful bed.
I'm busy at the Astrodome
Checking the roof for leaks,
A tiny meteoric shower,
(The first for seven weeks) :
Has threatened all the oxygen
We'd saved from the garden beds,
For now that Jon has disappeared,
I do his work instead.
The stars begin to glimmer,
Take form in the empty gloom,
And then I see the blue planet
Steal into the room,
The sapphire set in endless space
That once I'd called my home,
Now seems so far beyond my trace
As I watch it through the dome.
A week now short of seven months
Since I arrived on Mars,
This lonely outpost of despair,
Red wasteland of the stars,
A soil that's mainly iron ore
Whipped up in clouds of dust,
But dry, so dry, no water here -
Won't even start to rust.
We live within the Astrodome,
A perspex, clear balloon,
Much patched and fixed, and worn it is
But still we call it home,
We venture out in oxy-suits,
Explore the wild terrain,
But nothing keeps us out at night
In those swirling winds of pain.
Jon had been here eighteen months
With his wife, a botanist,
His title was 'The Engineer',
His degree was, somehow, 'lost'.
We argued once, we argued twice,
[...] Read more
poem by David Lewis Paget
Added by Poetry Lover
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