4.14.14

My photo prompt for today was "sky."  So I give you this poem, which is a conglomeration of several prompts: the "sky" prompt (the article I got the "borrowed" lines from is about Mars); and a couple "official" NaPoWriMo prompts dealing with "borrowing" lines from an online article, and a second one dealing with writing a poem where every line is a question. Don't judge too much...I sort of like how it turned out. :)

Borrowed Poem Q&A

Where is the sky hiding?
The search for life on Mars is now in its sixth decade
If you could travel anywhere, where would you go?
The closer we look, the more hostile the planet seems: parched and frozen in every season, its atmosphere inert and murderously thin, its surface scoured by solar winds
What is childhood but a pleasant dream?
Still, we keep going back. Like a delinquent sibling, Mars is all we’ve got
What are the chances that it will all turn out right in the end?
It was a dart flung at a dartboard twenty thousand feet away.
How can you care about something so big?
he did his best to act as if nothing were at stake.
Where did you sleep when you were a child?
True, it was a wasteland.
It was? What is it now?
The signs of life are self-erasing.
Mama, can the stars see us?
This wasn’t just a little detour
Do you remember the night we drove across Nebraska, hit Colorado at sunup?
It’s a self-eating watermelon of despair.
Have you ever seen snow by starlight alone?
the rover would swing like a pendulum as it flew
Can all things fly, if they try hard enough?
The air is so thin that the first glimmer of sun can throw it into violent convection, lofting up into towering thermals, twisting into dust devils, and collapsing back down as they cool.
The sand beneath bare feet, cooling with the evening, the tall beach grasses whispering—is all that still there now that we are not?
Lucky socks were worn
What is luck, good or bad?
ZERO margin of error
How do you tell a lesson from a mistake?
the giddy days that followed
How many stars are there, really?
born under a blue moon three weeks after
Is the moon really blue, Mama? Is it?
the cycle starts over.

The "borrowed" lines come from the article entitled "“The Martian Chroniclers:
A new era in planetary exploration.”
by Burkhard Bilger, dated April 22, 2013 and available on www.newyorker.com.