The Winds of Mars
by Albert Katz
it was not long ago
that I learned space
was an empty void where men
in bulky white suits floated gently,
doing bouncy somersaults on the moon
in pristine quiet
and now from Mars
the resonations of 15 mph gusts sounding
so much like the rumble of storms,
the moans heard when ice was forming
across the lake where I spent my youth,
the crackle my old record player made
when the song ended
and the stylus went round and round
what would my grandfather
raised in a shtetl in the Russian pale say
about these sounds?
he believed the world was flat
and the moon larger than the sun
because that is how he saw it
and when I argued with him
he warned my 8-year old self
not to be taken in by pictures
on the TV so easily manipulated
he didn’t listen to my protestations then
and if alive today
would probably not believe me
when I told him
that winds stream across Mars
and, if you listen carefully,
you can hear the play
of celestial woodwinds and percussion
—
Albert Katz has recently retired as a professor of psychology, well published in research journals on topics in his two scholarly fields: language comprehension and everyday memory. His literary work has appeared in Ariel Chart, Ascent, Pangolin Review, Poetry Quarterly, Soft Cartel, and Rattle, among others. He has also published two short stories.