Still Gnawing
by James Ph. Kotsybar
Thanks, Prometheus,
your inspired gift was the very thing
our species needed to give our survival chances a lift.
(Would we could have, for you, interceded.)
What you saw as aid
was deemed arms dealing,
since it put us on top of the food chain.
Your appropriation
was judged stealing,
though you took it for us,
not your own gain.
Eternity chained to rock
seems severe enough,
without having your liver pecked by raptor, just to have it reappear
again next day,
again to have it wrecked.
Though happy your sentence
was served sparsely,
why was your crime penalized
so harshly?
About the Author
Chosen for special recognition by NASA, James Ph. Kotsybar is the first poet to be published to another planet. His haiku currently orbits Mars aboard the MAVEN spacecraft, appears in the mission log of The Hubble Space Telescope, and was featured at NASA’s Centaur Art Challenge at IngenuityFest, Ohio.
Last Summer, he performed his poetry before an international audience of scientists, journalists and actual Troubadours in their founding city of Toulouse, France, at the EuroScience Open Forum (ESOF2018) by invitation and has been invited back to ESOF2020 to be held in Trieste, Italy.
Most recently he has had poems published in The Bubble, Askew, The Society of Classical Poets, LUMMOX Press, Sixfold, Mason’s Road, Encore and Scifaikuest, and has received honors from The State Poetry Society of Michigan and the Balticon 48 Poetry Competition. He especially enjoys science poetry, because of its extended shelf-life.