Christina Sng
Mission to Mercury
Standing on Mercury’s surface,
I scan the utter desolation,
The kiln-like sterility,
A planet once abundant,
Now bare and stripped down.
The sun dances back and forth
In the sky like a metronome
As I search for signs of life.
But the crew is dead, sprawled
Rag dolls on an abandoned beach.
How am I alive?
Our shuttle is beyond repair,
Scattered shards of metal
In a Mercurial junk yard.
I sleep in my suit, broken
Beside the corpses
Of my fallen friends,
And in the morning,
I recharge my batteries—
A full day in the blazing sun.
There is much work to be done.
_______________
Christina Sng is the Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of A Collection of Nightmares and Elgin Award nominees, Astropoetry and An Assortment of Sky Things. Her poetry, fiction, and art have appeared in numerous venues worldwide, including Apex Magazine, Cricket, Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, New Myths, and Polu Texni. Visit her website.
Editor’s Notes: I was tempted to use a temperature map of Mercury’s north polar region, together with the artwork of artojka (an image of a spacecraft crash landed on an alien planet), but ultimately I chose the image used here from wallhere.
