To Earth, From Mars

Photograph via Flickr by bluedharma

You are the blue sapphire
of the night sky.
I am the rust-colored
dwarf in your shadow.

You want to believe
the mythology of me
as “the bright and burning one”
and not as “the thing of rage”
scarred eons ago by a myriad
of meteors, trapped by darkness.

I’ve told you this before
but you keep searching
my caves for microscopic
evidence of elements
we have in common—
aluminum, iron, magnesium—
clues I can be what you need
me to be: water-rich, able
to sustain your breathing.

Don’t claim my three billion
year old clay rocks as your hope.
See me for what I am now:
a fractured mass of metal
crumbling into red dust.

Pamela L. Taylor is a data guru by day and a poet by night. She has a doctorate in Social Psychology from UCLA, an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is a Cave Canem Fellow. Her work has appeared in print in …and love: Poetry Anthology (Jacar Press, 2011), The Best of the Fuquay-Varina Reading Series 2012 (Main Street Rag, 2012), and Sou’wester Literary Journal as well as online at Backbone Press, Blackberry Literary Magazine, Mused: The BellaOnline Literary Review, and Pedestal Magazine. For the past four years, she has been a co-organizer of Living Poetry, a group that organizes and promotes poetry events throughout the Triangle area of North Carolina. Her blog, A Poet's Double Life, is geared toward poets with non-literary careers. When Pamela is not working or writing, she’s dancing Argentinean tango.