In years to come gangly young martians
will run giggling down this now-silent
slope; their elders – with shaking heads – will lope
behind, tired eyes searching for and finding
the jagged rocks and layers of stone so famous from old
photographs, taken ten thousand sols before
by a slow-motion rover that roamed Victoria’s sand-
and dust-drowned bands of fossilised dunes,
greeting each new dawn with a whir
of weary wheels, gently and gingerly feeling
its way across and along the dry shore of Duck Bay,
watching the snail-slow ebb and flow of Verde’s
velvet shadow sweep across the ground…
So sad its tracks will fade away
decades before they are replaced by boot-prints
left by pilgrims from Mars’ Evening Star.
But when those bold explorers, hearts swollen
with pride, stand on this crater’s high serrated edge
and stare down at the dune-sea far below
they’ll say “Down there, that’s where the rover
rolled when I was just a child,” then smiling,
turn their faces to the coppery Sun and wish
they’d been on Mars the day brave Opportunity
climbed out onto the plain again
and left Victoria’s secrets far behind…
© Stuart Atkinson 2008
Astropoetry 