We cannot yet go there in person – even gloved
our barely-evolved monkey paws would freeze
in Mars’ vacuum chamber air – so we built an heir,
a robot child to go and play and dig and scrape
at the cold dirt in our place; sent it racing
to an alien beach then set it scratching
at the ground to see what treasures hid beneath
its Sun-baked, rusted duricrust. Slowly, weakly,
Phoenix’s metal beak raked meakly
across Mars’ skin, slicing into it, leaving behind
a gaping wound, wide and smooth of side,
a crumbling window into Barsoom’s past life,
a mini-Marineris, the next best thing
to Being There.
When that first trench was dug I peered into my screen
and half-thought I would see the bloody stumps of worms
wriggling in its sides, cut in half by the slicing blade
of the robot’s bucket scoop swooping down from the pale pink
sky like an angry gardener’s spade. But nothing moved
down there; no beetles scuttled between those stones,
no lonely, black-shelled centipede weaved in an out
of the camera’s field of view, and I knew
no skeletal hands of gnarled and twisted roots would
reach out from the trench’s tiny grave… just slanting shafts
of sunlight casting Death dark shadows behind each carved up clod
of dirt, each picture telling the watching world
“You’ll find no fossils here.”…
Phoenix quietly went about her work… watching the shrunken
Sun rolling on its sine wave roller-coaster track
across the sky…sighing at TEGA’s tantrums,
trickling tasty bits of dirt and grit into its hungry mouth.
And as she works each whispered whirr of motors, each gentle purr
of gears disturbs the trench’s rampart walls and sends so-small
Yosemite Falls of cinnamon dust tumbling to its floor.
And now, look there – frost! A hint of ice glinting in the lee
of the stones and folds of dirt standing on its furrowed
floor, each smear and stain and fragile flake of brittle blue
proof this world is not the bone dry desert History claims,
and Life may one day grace this land again…
© Stuart Atkinson 2008
Astropoetry 