A Family Holiday on the Red Planet

Enjoy a Luxe Vacation! said the sign.
The lakes are peerless, the vistas are divine.
The sky’s a lovely cinnamon, the strands
are neither hot nor cold, so make your plans.
The best part? You will get fantastic tans!

Mars, now terraformed, is quite the spot
for a family holiday!
No fear of losing muscle tone. We’ve got
artificial gravity rooms that dot
a land as grand as Martinique in May.

They’re dressed in Terra garb—a tasseled shawl
on the girl’s shoulders, a skirt
that matches the sand and sandals on her small
pink feet; a summer dress on mom; a shirt
symbolic of ancient tunes on dad. The doll

inside its Maya wrap is slumbering
against its father’s chest.
Inside its dreams it hears the sand dunes sing,
follows the billows as they drift and wing
en route to the copper skyline in the west.

Yes, there’s a city in the distance, first
of its kind on the clays of Mars.
It will not help them as they die of thirst.
Sand-bullets have already left deep scars
across defenseless skin like scimitars.

Nobody hears them wailing, sees them running,
their faces paling, though they have been sunning.
As sand grains fly, some large as creek rock gravel
(whose fault is it they caught the bug for travel?),
they feel their suntanned flesh start to unravel ...

Reposted this poem ("Sol Concealed") at #92.

Breakup

Earth is catching up with Mars in an encounter
that will culminate in the closest approach
between the two planets in recorded history.

The thought unsettled me. I couldn’t rest.
An e-mail I’d read yesterday said Mars
would be spectacular. I quickly dressed,
walked out the door, stepped off the porch and — there,
there it hung, eclipsing all the stars
and looming large as the full moon! Through glare

I saw dark stains and the south polar cap,
great hollow places, valleys, peaks. At dawn
the daily paper, like a thunderclap,
announced enormous tidal flows had battered
every shoreline. Many towns were gone,
and even major coastal cities shattered.

The e-mail wasn’t just a story, then,
to fade like morning glories. On the fence
the morning glories drank the sun and, when
I looked at them, their blossoms seemed as blue
as ever, while that orb in the intense
warm rays of daylight drifted out of view.

While pondering how that planet could have spun
this close, I felt a tremor in the ground,
and knew there wasn’t anywhere to run.
And then a slap of memory as bright
as a bolide burst. I pretty nearly drowned
in the dazzle of your face in morning light

receding now, a pallid apparition
too far to knock the world out of position.

You need a password for the "Private" sites. This was done to avoid prior publication rules for competition entries. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to send it to you, but I'm sure that if you ask Jayne, she'll give it to you.

Well, this sizeable collection seems to be very nearly complete. Here's a quick squib for one that hasn't been done yet:

Now, let’s have no more jokes about my name;
Your smutty, childish humour frankly bores,
And proud Uranus has no cause for shame.
If you persist, I’ve this to say: “Up yours!”

Doomed Planets

The surface of Venus is hot enough
to melt lead. And I know I have not enough
cojones to visit that world
where perhaps giant ferns had unfurled
long ago in its youth in the spring
when tree frogs assembled to sing,
birds winging across the pure air ...
In the cosmos, it’s not all that rare
for a planet to turn into hell,
becoming extremely unwell
before it is barely a baby.
Can we save our own world? Maybe. Maybe.

Brian, Ann, welcome to the ship and thanks for your contributions, lol. And Brian, thanks for the info; I asked Jayne about the sites after Martin mentioned them and she gave me the password. I've just peeped in so far :-)

Martin, thanks for enjoying 'World of Old Jove'. I think Jove knows he's not going to get any visitors; he just fancied bursting into song.

Yes, a friend mentioned that things are relatively peaceful nowadays. I don't believe in gods. I do believe that the measure of happiness is tricky, to put it mildly. People often assume I must be miserable because I'm chronically ill.

Thanks for your latest poems on this thread; it's all great stuff. Are you singing in 'Doomed Planets'? I've just been swinging with Coleman (so to speak), so I'm in music mode. I used up my creative time on Flat today (very excited to have found it), but anyone else is welcome to take Neptune of course :-)

Gods are a fiction invented by humans. But it was useful for huge numbers of people to cooperate with each other. The most useful fiction that has ever been hatched by humans is money. You can’t eat, drink, or wear a dollar bill or a pound. And now most money is in the form of ones and zeros inside the brains of computers. Speaking about “happiness,” here’s the preamble from the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness ...

Yuval Noah Harari rewrites it as:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.

A Darwinist Deconstructs the Declaration of Independence

https://evolutionnews.org/2019/05/a-...-independence/

I’ve been listening to various chapters of the audiobook of Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, as well as some parts of Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.

I sure am!

Now that you have the password for Deep Drills, Fliss, I look forward to seeing you there!

I can't contribute anything to your planet poems... the nearest thing I ever wrote was a sonnet in praise of the sky at night... not specific enough, and not amusing, either.

Jayne