Venetian Landing Crafts: A Survey
That manmade debris
Those landing crafts
of ours stubbornly
sticking to the planet surface
insisting upon
their own contributions
to Venus’s winds
and turbulences
stubbornly creating tiny
vortices for the winds
to notice – a scherzo melody
Such
stubborn
beautiful
soldiers
saluting
upon
Hoary Venus
Precarious Venus
frozen in place in the lava-hot winds
In the end, neither Venus
nor her belt-of-dunes nor
her flesh-of-sharp-canyons
were altogether unmoved
by them
Now their features
complemented one another;
complimented each other
The landing crafts
and their host
Hoary Venus
Boastful Venus
If one listens carefully
one can almost hear them
speak vespers together
Round manmade saucers
placed across that planet
here there and everywhere
like the boy who wanted freckles
so much he gave himself
freckles with a magic marker
and went to school proud
of his facial handiwork
here there and everywhere
Tiny pretty human constructs
speckling a created province
I think He is pleased with it
Thomas Simmons is a professor at the University of South Dakota School of Law and a lifelong South Dakotan. His scholarship focuses on trusts and estates. He teaches courses in estate planning, professional ethics, and the Holocaust. His poems have been published in, inter alia, El Portal, Corvus Review, Nebo, and North Dakota Quarterly.
