The Gods As They Are, On Their Planets - The Poet's Press

AUTUMN ON MARS
for Ray Bradbury
On Mars the black-trunked trees
are dense
with summer’s crimson foliage.
When dry-ice autumn comes,
the oaks singe sickly green.
The land is a riot of airborne olive,
chartreuse and verdigris,
green fire against a pink
and cloudless sky.
The sour red apples go yellow sweet;
the wind-blanched wheat
forsakes its purple plumage;
cornstalks are tied in indigo bundles;
eyes flicker ghoulishly
as candles are set
in carved-out green gourds.
Grandfathers warn their
terrified children
of the looming, ominous blue planet,
roiled with thunderclouds
and nuclear flashes,
that warlike, funeral-colored Earth
from which invaders would
one day come,
decked in the somber hues of death,
withered and green like dead-pile leaves,
armed to the hilt with terrible weapons.
“I’ve seen them!” an elder asserts.
“They have two eyes,
flat on their heads!”
Eye stalks wiggle in disbelief.
“They walk on two legs,
like broken sticks!”
Multi-jointed leglets thump in derision.
“They speak in the animal octave,
and they bark like krill-dogs.”
The children shriek in red and purple.
“No way, Old One!
Don’t make us think it!
How can they talk without twinkling?”
“Their rockets go higher with every turn
of our world around the life-star.
Earthers will come, thick on the ground
like our thousand-year mugworms.
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They will kill us,
take our females captive,
burn our egg domes,
eat our aphidaries!”
A fireball slashes the pink horizon.
Two hundred eye-stalks follow the arc.
“That might be one
of their robots now!
Their probes are watching everywhere!”
Now fifty Martian youngsters scream,
shrieking in ultraviolet tones,
crab legs scattering in every direction.
The Old Ones smile in five dimensions,
sit down for a cup of hot grumulade
and some well-earned peace and quiet.
“It’s not nice to frighten
the young ones,”
the eldest muses, “but it wouldn’t be
autumn
without a little Halloween.”
PLUTO DEMOTED
No longer a planet, they say!
Pluto, Hades, Yuggoth, Nine
is now a nothing,
a rock among rocks
despite the tug of its companion,
silent and airless Charon.
Now you are a “mini-world,”
an oversize asteroid
tumbling in dustbelt
so dark and distant
our sun is but a blob
of wavering starlight.
World of death and darkness,
methane, monoxide molting
in every orbiting,
shunned by the sun that made you,
must you now be snubbed by man?
How demote a planet
so lustrous in history?
It has its gods! It has its gods!
Can they evict
the Lord of the Dead