by Mark Pirie
I looked at my companions. Dazed, exhausted,
but a spring of joy fl owed in every one.
A human was about to step on Mars. The moment
I had dreamt about had come. I crawled into the airlock.
I waited till it cycled. I stepped outside
and felt the Martian sun.
The cold air chilled me. The red light was eerie.
The great deed of my life was done.
117
Tim Jones
The First Artist on Mars
Well, the fi rst professional artist.
There were scientists who, you know,
dabbled
but NASA sent us –
me and two photographers –
to build support for the program.
The best day?
That was in Marineris.
Those canyons are huge
each wall a planet
turned on its side.
I did a power of painting there.
You can see all my work
at the opening. Do come.
Hey, they wanted me to paint propaganda –
you know, ‘our brave scientists at work’ –
but I told them
you’ll get nothing but the truth from me
I just paint what I see
and let others worry
what the public think.
Still, the agency can’t be too displeased.
They’re sponsoring my touring show.
That’s coming up next spring.
Would I go back? Don’t know.
It’s a hell of a distance
and my muscles almost got fl abby
in the low G. Took me ages
118
to recover – lots of gym and water time
when I should have been painting.
But Jupiter would be worth the trip!
Those are awesome landscapes
those moons, each one’s so different.
Mars is OK – so old, so red,
so vertical. Quite a place
but limited, you know?
119
Puri Alvarez
Saturn’s Rings
Where, out of the many rooms of time,
does this box of sound belong?
It contains the tides of infi nity.
After meeting myself in the mirror of your eyes,
I remembered when I saw you last.
It must have been further than a light year away
and you whispered to me:
‘Even from the edge of Saturn’s rings
the answer to those questions that belong to Eternity,
the answer, I say, is love.’
120
Robert Sullivan
from Star Waka
iv 2140AD
Waka reaches for stars – mission control clears us for launch and we are off to check the guidance system
personally. Some gods are Greek to us Polynesians,
who have lost touch with the Aryan mythology,
but we recognise ours and others – Ranginui and his cloak,
and those of us who have seen Fantasia know Diana
and the host of beautiful satyrs and fauns.
We are off to consult with the top boss,
to ask for sovereignty and how to get this
from policy into action back home.
Just then the rocket runs out of fuel –
we didn’t have enough cash for a full tank –
so we drift into an orbit we cannot escape from
until a police escort vehicle tows us back
and fi nes us the equivalent of the fi scal envelope
signed a hundred and fi fty years ago.
They confi scate the rocket ship, the only thing
all the iwi agreed to purchase with the last down payment.
46
it is feasible that we will enter
space
colonise planets call our spacecraft waka
121
perhaps name them after the fi rst fl eet
erect marae transport carvers renew stories
with celestial import
establish new forms of verse
free ourselves of the need for politics
and concentrate on beauty
like the release from gravity
orbit an image until it is absorbed
through the layers of skin
spin it
sniff and stroke the object
become poetic
oh to be in that generation
to write in freefall picking up the tools
our culture has given us
and to let them go again
knowing they won’t hit anyone
just stay up there
no longer subject to peculiarities
of climate the political economies
of powers and powerless
a space waka
rocketing to another orb
singing waiata to the spheres
122
Chris Pigott
‘We’re thinking of going into space’
We’re thinking of going into space.
John’s tired of the smell of grass
and automobiles, and women
are bringing him down. He can not
see very clearly now,
in space it’s of no matter:
they have comets and asteroids
and a million little satellites up there
but the ship will drive itself.
That’s what John wants
to give up the wheel,
to watch the blackness or blueness
or any other stinking colour
drift on by. Me, I’m just
out of rope. I hear in space
there’s all kinds of nail and wood
to be had. This is my plan:
a space hut, for John and me,
where we can get the rhythm of the place,
where we can sit back, and where
we can give up the fi ght, at last.
123
Mark Pirie
Liam Going
Dear all
Today I’m leaving
not just my workplace
but the Entire Planet.
My best wishes to everyone,
I’ve enjoyed my 20+ years here,
and especially the company
and friendship
of so many of you.
I don’t know what the future holds,
but one avenue I’m exploring is
an on-line space supply shop:
it’s listed on the Department’s
Interplanetary Bulletin Board.
I’m also available on contract
(unless I get snapped up by big money aliens)
for writing, editing, robot photography,
photo-editing, layout, space design,
and alien sound recording and editing.
I’m logging off now,
but you can contact me at
Planet Maxus (on the Space Net)
or spacemail me: liam2go@maxus
Ngā mihi o te ngākau ki a koutou kātoa
124
Iain Britton
Departing Takaparawha
A woman squats.
She’s not peeing
or grubbing for worms.
She hugs her coffee
and stares at clouds
at islands in the gulf.
A man
cut from wood
and heavily tattooed
sits astride a gate
his penis
pointing at the sun.
Another man
the colour of dirt
comes to us
strips off his old clothes
and stands sweating
upright in the light.
In his house masked people
leap down from walls
and sit on the fl oor. They tal
k
and chant genealogies.
On the roof
someone
125
tugs strings,
works eyes
and limbs.
The show goes on.
We traipse outside
visibly swallowing the day.
A child (as if hatching)
crawls from her dugout
in the ground
and takes off.
A man crinkled like silver foil
tells us she has this passion
for re-enactments
for re-entering the earth’s atmosphere
when she’s ready.
126
Bill Sewell
The Imaginary Voyage
fascinated from the start
what methods they devised
to make that crossing:
the wings of large birds
strapped to their arms
a fl ock of swans in harness
a great many glasses full of Dew
and the gigantic cannon:
no world to mirror theirs
but dust rocks & a crystal sky
(though in the crater Tycho
they found nuggets of gold) –
later they ventured further
plunging into the mists
of the morning star
searching in vain for water
in the canals of Mars –
with these civilized & mined
they watched the sun
pale into the Galaxy
and grew old in the gulf
before Alpha Centauri –
they have seen
no glittering cities
nor golden oceans
127
only winking beacons
that no longer
give a course to steer by
(Canopus has grown dim
Aldebaran has fallen far behind):
Along Eridanus we drifted
Al Nahr the River of Heaven
drinking as we went
‘the sweet poison of the false infi nite’ –
others call it the Ashen Path:
how many blazing
or burnt out worlds
did we encounter there –
we sought enchanted isles
full of sweet fragrance & sound
but found not even the lotus
nor the deadly singing voices:
Argo and past Andromeda
avoiding the sea monster Cetus
each time we sent off the dove
it came back with nothing.
128
Rachel Bush
Voyagers
Guided by stars and changes in the sun,
travelling with hope and uncertainty,
voyagers carried water, food and songs.
They looked for cloud as a sign of land to
discover. They had come so far. Over
and over they heard paddles dip in waves
and chants that made their shoulders move beyond
the ache of their work. They knew wherever
they arrived they would have changed.
Inside their metal capsule, voyagers
move with weightless care. They have left the curve
of the world, the pattern of continents.
Still guided from earth they seek, calculate,
measure, compute, discover, travel far
and farther through black quiet space, the brilliance
of unknown stars. When they return they have
changed.
We too are voyagers and will be changed.
We do not know where we will discover
our future, but know we must start with guides
we trust and then must travel beyond them.
We too can move with hope through unknown seas
towards far stars.
129
Stephen Oliver
Letter to an Astronomer
Starry amorist, starward gone,
– Francis Thompson
Make no mistake – we arrived here fi rst, by pathways
mostly forgotten, hinted at maybe, in the clinging moss on
gutter and drain, by ruined foundations, under destroyed
civilizations. Look no more, we are the visitors we
seek come via starburst and interstellar dust, riding the cold chariots of comets, destined to make the biggest splash: –
hominid, Neanderthal, homo-sapien sought to track back to what ‘Courtyard of the Gods’, multiple or singular,
in search of the primal spark, can hardly be guessed at.
Our breath might be read within the banded spectrum
of your inquiry that magnifi es the sky’s falling domino;
by wingbeat of light fl eeing across the great glass lens.
Looking down through the whirligig
of immeasurable galaxies
will lead back again to the fi lmic awe over the retina as
you seek to locate by the interstices of deep space an echo in nothingness. Granaries of knowledge (gravity’s burden)
we laid down in ancient geologies; when we rested,
cities rose, when we walked, cities fell. Make no mistake
there’ll be neither alien ship nor coded message exchanged, merely (coming in under radar) signs of our passing
in time, most fl uid of inventions – condemned forever to
rush forward, condemned forever to rush backward.
The orchard is rotten, the fi eld beyond, cloaked in the
dandelion or wildfl ower waits for the plough or the sword.
130
Memory’s digital code recounts something discarded, as though God looked away for an instant after creation
and like uncertain visitors we fl ed from his hand as we fell.
January 14, 2000
131
The Final Frontier
Helen Rickerby
TABLOID HEADLINES
DOG GROWS MAN’S HANDS
MAN GROWS DOG’S HEAD
NUDE ARTISTS PAINT CLOTHED MODEL
PIGEON ROBS BANK
WOMAN WALKS ON WATER: ‘NO I’M NOT THE
MESSIAH, I’M JUST VERY CLEVER’
3 MONTH OLD STANDS TRIAL ON MURDER CHARGE
HOUSE RUNS AWAY FROM HOME: ‘IT WAS THERE
WHEN I LEFT FOR WORK’
SPORT MAD MAN’S HEAD BECOMES A RUGBY BALL
‘ELVIS WAS MY MOTHER’
TIGER CUB GETS TOP MARK IN HISTORY EXAM
‘THAT’S MR CYCLOPS TO YOU’
WOMAN MARRIES ALIEN EMPEROR: ‘I ALWAYS WAS
AMBITIOUS’
MAN’S HEAD EXPLODES WHILE SHAVING
ALIEN EMPRESS POISONS NEW BRIDEGROOM,
BECOMES SOLE RULER OF 10 GALAXIES: ‘I TOLD
YOU I WAS AMBITIOUS’
135
Sue Wootton
the verdigris critic
Suddenly tired
of the complicated interlacing of words in lyrical trim
she goes outside
and shouts very loudly
into the night.
The stars tremble
infi nitesimally
then regroup.
In a distant time
on a distant planet
a literary critic with a greenish tinge
cups a tentacle to a blobular ear
hears UCK! UCK! UCK! UCK! UCK!
reverberate gently in the heavens.
Ah, sighs the verdigris critic.
Truly, poetry
is universal.
136
Richard von Sturmer
from Mill Pond Poems
III
Autumn leaves overlap
on the surface of the pond.
Minnows gather
beneath an empty boat.
Their world is
apparently seamless
while I am like that astronaut
in Tarkovsky’s
fi lm
who returns to his father’s house
and to the stillness
of a sleeping lake.
A momentary lapse
of concentration
(the slightest breeze will do)
and he knows that he will lose
the vine-covered pillars
the cracked steps
the golden light.
He knows that he will fi nd himself
back in the depths of space.
137
Brian Turner
Earth Star
Before we commence, consider a proposition
we must ask, and examine, a question;
in this case a big question like, for instance,
What is the Universe?
To begin, then,
Why is it as it is?
Was there a Bang, rather biggish,
and is there, or was there, a Bumper?
Is, or was there a Whumper
become a Whimper? And will there be
a Mend before the End
or is it all without…? Was there a
beginning? What were conditions like:
think of the power of coincidence, of
‘fi ne-tuning’ states, circumstances,
of the mercurial skill in knowing
when and what and how to choose
‘the’ moment. And was there, is there
cognizance in cooperation? Is there God,
and whose God? Good God, are there
many ‘worlds’, and many Gods,
and is there one who is ‘wholly good’?
(Things as they are are different
here than on another star, or are
138
they, and how are things with you
anyway, wherever you are?) Every
conceivable world exists. Nothing
ever exists. How are things
on Earth star? Which possibility
obtains, and why? is the question
you must put to the sky above
you. (Things as they are
are, far out there, are elsewhere,
better by far, better by … hah!)
Say, I will be true to you
but what caused you in the course
of time, over time? Are natural laws
the only real laws, and have they fl aws,
and are you a once day wonder?
When your part of this world is good
why is it not as good more often,
and is it bad elsewhere
when it is good here? Good grief,
explain, select, be a randomeer.
But who is your real, true heir, here,
and who in time, or out, will care?
And are there others out there
beyond the stratosphere, quite near to here,
and will we, or others like us, one day soon
meet others, odder than us, playing
even odder, more peculiar tunes?
Surely not: surely, why not?
139
Gary Forrester
The Thirst That Can Never Be Slaked
In pursuit of Anna, Rusty circled the moon.
Spacesick in his module, his heartbeat
reached one hundred nine.