Poetry for Engineers: A Martian Rover Sends a Postcard Home

Already, I’ve almost forgotten rain; I know I will never know that again. I move forward with the powers you gave me to live up to my name, Curiosity. This is a land without leaves, fronds, or spines. If there are plants, they are small and supine, dust hidden, like light here, filtered and sand softened, at home in the thin air, thousands of motes so small they seem to be fluid, more fog than firmament. Shadows, few and far from here, I know I must go to them to see if they hold order or mayhem or just another common rock or two. If a machine can miss the Earth, I do. Paul Jones was inducted into the NC State Computer Science Hall of Fame in 2021. His poetry has taken an unusual journey beyond Earth—a manuscript of his poems crashed into the moon's surface in 2019, while another lunar mission with his poems aboard successfully landed in February 2024. Jones’s recent work has appeared in Rattle, Hudson Review, New Verse Review, Salvation South, Tar River Poetry, and Southern Poetry Review, as well as in anthologies including Best American Erotic Poems (From 1800 to the Present). His first collection, Something Wonderful, was published by Redhawk Publications in 2021, followed by Something Necessary in September 2024. For more, visit http://smalljones.com or find him on social media as @smalljones.