Two bold craters, other pocks,
An asteroid’s secrets look like
Amyloid plaques on a distant plot,
Brown shades mixed with silver hues.
Artist’s rendition, a probe’s 2029
Transition, panels to pan a riddled
Surface, solve riddles, pen
New fiction.

Even space gems know their worth,
They don’t spin in Freud’s chair.
16 Psyche, what of the other
Tripled quintet? M-type bodies,
This one Massachusetts large,
Another rock to land on.
This $10,000 quadrillion potato,
Unforgiving and cold,
Illustrations belie data,
Guesses, like an elderly memory’s
Magnetic-field flow, or a
Dead seed with no room to grow?

Dark matter surrounds, imagines
Its possibilities. The universe
May be a tree, but we can’t see the roots.
Yet we will visit a twirling orb,
Uncover its pleasantries, hard
And fast rules. Porous impacts
detract, while mankind fights for
Remnants of animal organs, tissues,
Abnormal conditions, knowledge
Creeps in the million-mile cracks.
We’ll make new machines to analyze,
Forge diatribes of industrial oblivion,
Humanity’s reckless hive,
Honeycombs scanned,
Spacecraft unmanned.

What do our cerebral craters reveal
About our core? We, lost animal
Planetesimals? Worlds within worlds.
Words within NASA’s tests
Beckon to the darkness,
The fog of the birth of a system.
Psyche and Eros, we enjoin,
Solar hints and absent friends.

What new psychology emerges?
We’ll still lie about our place in the universe.
About paradox people who have never visited,
Abscond as ants to alien worlds.

We have answers in our skin,
Our own porous holes, innards
Filled with mercury, outward
Manifestations, rings of gold.
The jewels can’t obscure the muse.
We are stars, light fused into shapes,
Sentient notions, unconscious devotions.

Each brane of the cosmos a brain,
Each hard metallic surface
A clue to an unknown collision,
Or the last conglomerate’s collusion.
The carved core a vast spore to lure
Sibilant squires of titanic industry.
What will Psyche do to our psyche,
If she reveals us in the mirror?

In a billion years the residue of man
May look at a similar metal ball,
A lost planetary core,
Trying to remember, if ever,
A pale blue planet

Existed.

_

The title is the headline of a March 24, 2026, Universe Today story about the Psyche space probe’s voyage to the M-type asteroid 16 Psyche. The spacecraft will arrive at the Asteroid Belt in 2029.