Life in the Yellow

More than one I saw that day,

I saw many rivulets of a sulfur-yellow sludge,

Even small sprigs of an unknown plant

Springing from the turf on either side,

Thought I hadn’t been sent here in vain,

The enterprises of the human are not all lost,

We may be reborn on some moon of Saturn

In some form, even if it’s this: life in the yellow,

An unknown life on an only recently discovered terrain.



Grain after grain of samples of the mud I collected,

But when I returned to the ship, entered the coordinates,

It wouldn’t start so I was stuck there, poor dreamer

   that I was,

I went back out to hike along the yellow streams

Until my oxygen ran out. Now I lay there,

Yellow-brown mud with alien twigs coming out of it,

Capable still of saying, if all other words had been cut short,

That there is life even here, that there is future in the dirt.