venus earth mars

I read today, in school,
that the earth is old, old, old
and venus is cloudy, poison, and hot,
and can’t support life
but according to David Stevenson of the respectable California Institute of Technology,
venus’ atmosphere used to be just like earth’s
a billion billion years ago

and you know, it made me cry,
at my table, over my textbook,
because then they had a picture of earth a long way away,
spherical, lovely, and striped with blue

in the moment that I saw it inked
our billion billion years, in a little dot.
and one day maybe earth will be like venus
our lives, our everything, the blossom of a flower
the once and final blooming of the forget-me-not
somewhere lost in space