Mars Poem by David Lewis Paget

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,
His wife the referee,
If you're cast adrift on Mars, my friend
Then 'War' is to disagree!

We went to explore a distant cave,
Leaving behind his wife,
To see if this planet's underground
Had ever supported life,
We took the tractor, digging tools,
Specimen boxes too,
But when we discovered a tunnel there
He waved at me - 'Go through! '

I stood back there in the darkness,
Refusing to go ahead,
For I'd never turn my back on one
Who'd said he 'wished me dead! '
I let him down at the entrance hole
On a rope - he'd started to rave,
So I ran out to the tractor then
And drove it out of the cave.

It's seven miles of crags and mounds
From the cave to the Astrodome,
And Mars doesn't have a magnetic field,
No compass to lead him home,
The light was fading, fading fast,
He never would find his way,
But Sylvie was there at the outer door
To welcome me, anyway!

'It's done! ' I said, 'it's seven miles,
And just three hours of oxygen,
He'll rush, he'll run, he'll tear his suit,
You'll never see your Jon again! '
She kissed me then, and wrapped those long
White legs around me, pulled me down
Encased me in her long blond hair
And laughed, and said: 'I'm free again! '

'We'll give it a week, or maybe two,
Report the Engineer as lost,
Ask them to send a crew, and say
You're too upset to stay on Mars!
Then I'll come back when my year is up
And meet you there, they'll never know!
But we can begin the high life, once
They've paid you out; we'll just lie low! '

We sat together all that night,
Sat staring out at the swirling murk,
We feared to see if a hulking suit
Would come to lurch in the creeping dark.
'He's dead for sure, ' I said at midnight,
Breathed a sigh of pure relief,
'I'm glad he's gone, ' she whispered back,
'God! He drove me mad, the freak! '

I looked, and saw her glance at me,
Evil, both at her mouth and eyes,
I felt a shiver run through, athwart me,
Suddenly knew that she lay in lies.
She'd used me up in her murder plot,
Had no intentions of waiting for me,
So what would she tell them, back on earth?
That I had murdered the Engineer?

A week had gone, no sign of Jon,
We'd radioed back to Earth Control:
'Please rescue us, replace the crew,
The Engineer went for a permanent stroll.'
That night I got at the coffee grounds,
And drugged them well that she'd oversleep,
Then carried her out of the Astrodome,
No suit, no breath, no grim deceit!

The radio died on the following day
I watched when the stars were shining bright,
The blue of my planet wasn't so blue,
In fact, it looked quite red, on fire!
For days I watched as the holocaust
Threw mushroom clouds in the churning air,
'Til on the night of the fourteenth day
The Earth was not to be seen out there!

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,
And Mars is a fitting coffin
For a one, as good as dead!

24 June 2008