WATER ON MARS?

WATER ON MARS?

My mom took me to a museum exhibit

when I was young.

There was a special display,

pictures taken by satellite

as it passed over Mars.

The podium had big letters on it:

WATER ON MARS?

Why was it a question?

If there were pictures,

shouldn’t they know?

Apparently there are lots of ways

ice can form in space without water.

Why can’t we bring some back and melt it?

Apparently that’s harder than it seems.

But I don’t think it should be.

We already had a big camera

that could fly through the sky

away from here

from Earth

and through our atmosphere and past the moon

way far out into the glittering stars and blackness of space,

shooting off at who-knows-how-many-miles-per-hour.

How hard could it be to reach out and pick up

just a little piece of what we were looking at?

Besides, I wasn’t very curious about Mars.

It was red. So what?

Saturn had those rings I had never seen before.

Let’s see a picture of those.

Or a picture from inside the impossibly huge storm

on the surface of the gas giant, Jupiter.

I didn’t know much about the last three planets.

But why not take pictures of them too?

Then I would know more.

In fact, why ever stop?

Why stop only one mere planet away from us?

There have to be a lot more questions out there than just

WATER ON MARS?

Why not answer some of those?

Maybe because it was too much,

too scary,

to take pictures of things so far away.

Maybe it was hard enough to figure out if there was

WATER ON MARS?

and that kept us from asking more interesting questions

on podiums like these

in museums everywhere.

Besides,

its just water.

We have lots of it.

Right here.

On Earth.

I don't know if I could ever find the pictures I saw on the podium that day, but these remind me of them. I guess one picture of Mars looks much like another to me.

Inspirational Works:

David Bowie, Life on Mars?

• Frankly, I don't think I had a choice but to include this. You may disagree with me, because there is very little thematic similarities between my piece and this song, but I would have thought less of myself if this had been left out.

The Beatles, Across the Universe

• Still on the space theme, but at least this one makes more thematic sense. Across the Universe is a song that has always made me think about soaring through the cosmos. It's a song about wonder and about accepting all the beauty there is and can be.