Red Planet

Blazing rubric of late August nights,
fiery apparition of the moonless skies,
a myriad telescopes are trained on you,
billions of avid eyes, tracking
your enigmatic, urgent rise.

The Blue Planet that has you in its sights
is eager for new lessons in thermoluminescence -
How old are you, when were your features
formed, how were you so brutally transmogrified:
Gondwanaland to rock and sand and ice?

My country's henna Martian heartland,
dessicated lunar lakes, conceal the mummified
remains of halcyon days, before the ice-age changed
the songlines, sealed the aquifers' demise,
when inland seas and rivers of the dreamtime slowly died.

Beneath the awesome surface of the Red Planet
there may be life, the grains of sand
may soon unlock for readings of internal clocks,
to be reset by hands that come to green
the dehydrated plains, the first wave of migration
from a planet under mortal strain.

Refugees from dying stars - elusive 'aliens',
roam the cosmos, carrying their cargoes
from doomed otherworlds - keys to an identity
in language, art, technology: perhaps we'll meet
on that alluring frontier we call Mars…