The Martian

In the quiet twilight of a desert sky,
I hear the wind speak in a tongue of iron,
Its sighs a cracked old poem,
written across the dust and stone,
lined in the colour of rust and promise.

A figure steps, a shadow from the red crag,
wearing a cloak of fading comets,
each tinge of ochre catching the light as if it were a silvered scar.
The Martian, his name a myth, his presence a wonder:
his eyes, two distant moons that glow with longing.

He walks the dunes in measured steps, no rush beneath a looser wind; the ground is a steady, unblinking pulse.
The Earth’s “mile” is a memory on that vast horizon,
a forgotten kilometre that never quite meets his feet.
Here, seasons spare rhythm, and the sky is a copper floor.

He lifts his hands, and in those open fingers
suddenly the world shifts. The barren expanse erupts with colour— a flicker of life, a breath made whole.
It is as though each grain of sand is an unsung symphony,
his knowing gaze the conductor that coaxed them into song.

In the hush of a Martian dusk, the stars seem to lean forward,
lost in the fascination of this crimson wanderer.
If I stood beside him, we would look on dead constellations,
but our hearts would still pace a tender rhythm,
much like the blood that carried him first,
hundred‑thousand miles more from the gentle hum of home.

The Martian does not speak as we do,
yet there is poetry in the way the dust gathers at his boots,
the way the crag reeled in his footsteps, a chorus of silence, and the unspoken pledge that one day, perhaps, the earth‑bound world
would hear what the iron old wind had told it:
’Tis in wandering that the heart finds its own footing,
and on a world of flame and silence, it learns its own song.