Notes - recent NASA Mars photos / Amorella keeps me honest

         Mid-afternoon. You were looking over your photos from NASA and have two recent ones that are beyond words to you – that is, as you view them up close and personal because you never dreamed you would be able to see such a view. Drop them in, the Martian sunset first, then the photo from Mars to Earth in the Martian evening sky, i.e. Earth as we see Venus in the evening sky. - Amorella

Martian Sunset

  

From Mars to Earth as an Evening ‘Star’

         1538 hours. I did remove the arrow and “Earth” and on my desktop the ‘bluish’ planet can be readily seen. I am going to keep it on my desktop for a while.

         Post. - Amorella

         You and Carol took a short drive to McD’s on Mason-Montgomery Road and while there you remembered you wrote a poem about a Martian sunrise or sunset or seeing Earth in the evening or morning sky sometime in the seventies. It was published but you don’t remember where; and its title is: “Mars One”. You spent an hour at your basement desk looking through your files but did not find it. You found another titled “Moon City One” but it was about a man going earth (light) mad. – Amorella

         1807 hours. You are right; it has been an hour. I cannot find the poem but that is probably the reason for my ‘intensity of feeling’ in terms of the photographs shot from Mars. I rummaged through lots of writings and sketches. “Moon City” is a longer poem. “Mars One” was less than sixteen lines. I found a couple old poems that I thought about sharing and I found a hundred pages of an unfinished novel about the Druids that I had written in the eighties. Some of those pages I could drop right into “The Dead” selections with only minor revision.

         Evening. You had leftover soup and watched last week’s “Elementary” and “Intelligence” as well as NBC News. Since you have been in the basement looking for the Mars poem and after another hour you found it in a folder in your father-in-law’s old metal file cabinet. Here is the poem.

** **

FROM MARS:  1

By R. H. Orndorff  ©1979

            Crystalline pink reflections jab into a dark hued skylight.

            Laser-like they ray on the starkly singular human form

            Who is looking out toward his first Martian sunrise –

                        There is night, but there is no fog and mist.

                        There are no Grendel-like monsters here.

            His lips motion a secret and unofficial pronouncement,

                        “There will be no myths on the fourth world.”

His mind counters with a far distant thought.

                        One may be raised up

                        So that he might fall further down.

            To be alone, and the first, is truly a different existence –

            To comprehend the beginning of a full Martian sunrise

            One has to first witness his earthly world fading as a double world,

                        The low in-the-sky twin beauties;

                        One is dressed starkly naked white

                        And is touching her scantly clad blue-robed sister,

                        And each smiles suggestively down, towards him alone.

            “Until darkness falls,” are his only other words

            As he notes the forceful sun rising over a low rock-strewn dune.

           

            [Published – I think it was “The Blue Moon Gazette” a poetry booklet published in Albany, New York in 1979]

** **

         2211 hours. Obviously the photo does not show the Moon as I had envisioned, but when I write I am in the setting, in my mind I was there, and here in real life I can see a real example of the “scantly clad blue-robed sister”. It turns out I did have the words after all, at least some of them 35 years ago.

         You are still in surprise and privately wonder on the serendipity and happenstance of this moment that has lie in wait for these thirty-five years to occur. – Amorella

         It is as a gift.

         From whom? – Amorella

         Why do you do this? Why do you complicate the matter? I said it is as a gift, not a gift.

         I am reminding you of your grammar. A gift by definition must have a giver. So, who or what is implied as the giver? – Amorella

         I misspoke. It was an unintended remark. To answer your question though – it is a gift that I had lived long enough to write the poem and it is a gift that I lived long enough to see pretty much the real event in a NASA photograph. The gift is my longevity for which I am indeed thankful. I have had a most fortunate life. I have stated this before.

         So, you thank your lucky stars? – Amorella

         2229 hours. If I must respond to you as though I were dead and you are an Angel questioning me, then I say, “No, although I am an agnostic still (how do I know you are not an illusion and I am questioning myself). I thank G---D, if G---D so exists with what I have left, heartansoulanmind.”

         Now you can post knowing that this is you speaking the truth as far as you can know at present. – Amorella

         2234 hours. Wouldn’t it be easier for you to just say, “Do you swear on the Bible or on your mother’s grave?”

         One of your Bibles, the one you were given when you joined the Presbyterian Church, is in the basement with your books. A third of your mother’s cremains are in a can in the southeast corner of your bedroom behind your black chair. You would say it was blasphemous to swear on either, would you not? – Amorella

         The thought had not occurred to me but you are right I would rebel in arrogance. (What a humbling thought.)

         Now, post. Good night my young man. - Amorella

        2245 hours. I am grateful you keep me honest.

         In here I give you no choice, boy. - Amorella