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.