Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

One evening this summer, I took a stroll in the mountains to watch the Perseid meteor shower. Stars were visible only through branch clearings. The sky above Sparrow Hawk Road was narrowed by trees on either side. In pitch darkness, my eyes adjusted to pinpoints of light. Meteors burned their vanishing lines against the dark firmament. I counted a dozen white streaks in under five minutes. That night, instead of watching a stream of TV shows, I watched a rotating stream of constellations, satellites, and space debris.

I’ve come to believe our galaxy serves as a destination for our imaginations; it inspires our conjecture about the universe; it is where we land all of our queries about the meaning and origins of life, where we construct narratives that give us solace.

Yet, for some, space is a childhood, wish-fulfillment of interstellar travel. Last summer, billionaires took trips to the outer edges of earth in privately funded spacecraft. I surveyed my friends to learn who would, if given a ticket, ride shotgun to the Milky Way. Most reported “Not in a million years.”

How about exploring the ocean's depths? This summer, on a voyage to glimpse the Titanic, a 22-foot submersible craft with five passengers imploded thirteen thousand feet below sea level. Also this summer, Congress held hearings on UFOs – I mean, UAPs. A friend texted me to say she believes the aliens arrived years ago. This all had me wonder about people who seek adventure through exploration, and those willing to live in the mystery.

Today’s poem takes an imagined flight to other planets where freedom and a wild sense of play launch possibilities of creative existence.

On Mars
by Ariana Benson

                                                                                                                     i.
I was never much one for astronomy My basic grasp of the universe and its terrifying contents satisfied 
me most of my life. Pluto was a planet then wasn’t, then was again. I think I didn’t go outside to witness 
the eclipse because I’ve spent too many moons waiting 
for obstacles to pass between my world and its light, for celestial corpses to align. To deem them bodies 
implies life and humans have long known Earth only as a ghost


                                                                                                                     //
But when I see that water has been found on Mars, I feel a knot that my heart urges my tongue to curl into 
hope. I see life, blossoming bundles of cells that compose bodies instead of confining them. I see babies’ tiny 
feet splashing in puddles 
from which their very existence sprung I see water on Mars and know my children 
must never call home by any other name 



                                                                                                                     ii.
Our backyard awash in desert rust, we’ll fashion palaces from red sand, all the while sipping tea 
sweetened with spoonfuls of stardust. When winter rains turn craters into ponds, we’ll skate atop their 
frosted faces and in summer laze in their pooled relief from the heat The natal knowledge of how to swim 
having never fled a single child’s mind


                                                                                                                     //
they’ll have a galaxy of nebulae to nightly gaze upon, hair bathed in cool slate absent white-hot sun 
Gravity an alien bondage they’ll play ball palm entire planets, bound through the asteroid belt, swing from 
Saturn’s rings with their fingertips Astral amphibians, they’ll breathe purified pink sky through their skin 
Not a single gasp will escape their grip

"On Mars" by Ariana Benson. Used by permission of the poet.