Seeking Parental Consent (Psalm 137)

We’ve kept your letter, everything
You said was right and important,
Full of your warmth and honesty.
We’ve thought about it endlessly
But we’re young, change is what we want;
We like space, this move is a future
Claire and I can plan for and picture.
There are a million miles of unknowns
And I admit we are apprehensive
But we have each other, it’s not as if
This is Knox Johnson sailing off alone
Avoiding scurvy and arctic typhoon.
Yes it is. And like “man on the moon”
It’s our generation’s claim to be first
To pull back a frontier, a paradigm,
To change the way the world imagines
Itself, ourselves, for this is a new birth.
It’s not like nineteenth century Australia
All our ties severed forever,
We’ll tell you all that we see and build up.
I know that I may never hold your hands
Again – that is sadness we understand,
Gravity of family pulls both of us.
But this will be like Australia:
The start of settlement, something bigger;
Stretching low over strange terrain,
Bold homes in brown and blue-grey rocks
On plains the colour of butterscotch.
Untold grandeur of Olympus mountain;
Polar icecaps, longest, widest canyons
And all those questions
We don’t know we’ll be asking;
And all the good we’ll bring about.
We’d love you to be proud
Of the power we’ll be harnessing
In those thousand mile-per-hour winds.
You know we were never going to have kids.
But life found there will help humanity,
That life will be our devotion.
And if our ruddy-faced Mars is barren
We will nurture in soil, rich but rusty,
Cactus, asparagus, tomatoes
And when the sun sets in a blue halo
In its tawny sky we will look inwardly
Past two moons into the starfields
And we’ll search for ourselves
In your sky-scraping cities, your soft, green valleys,
Your intimate mountains.
We read your letter again and again.
We have taken on-board everything.

2009