Life on Mars?
Such a damn pitiful day for us,
roaming where we barely breathe at all,
where we launch to planets farming,
and maybe claim a country for our own
where on the caps, ice chokes all Ma’s roses blooming,
and pushes spiky tendrils up through the frost,
and wilded sweet weeds never waken to sing praises.
Bees make no honey for the children of the lost.
Yet, a moon of Phobos floating warmly up the colony’s
river branch slurried rich with farmed, flipping
minnows, leaping in Martian rust, an ochre glimmering glee, and,
in the ocean, green as sequoia needles at cathedral prayer it greets
the grey old women, firewood and clam shells tumble-armed,
with moon-scalloped cloudy pupils that remember
wolflike howling cosmonauts who desired them.
Look at those cavemen go, they said, licking their lips; shaking their hips.
