I found myself on Saturn VI.
Our ship was late arriving there
but, like our boosters, fate was fixed.
And Titan’s sirens laid their snares!
Yes, Kurt V.’s story held me rapt
when I was just a bookworm teen.
(Twelve years before my birth was fact
his Sci-Fi novel hit the scene.)
“We all know how to read the clues
to meaning found within ourselves,
but that has not always been true.”
Or so the story’s author tells.
His 1950s comic tale
of free will lost and purpose found
inspired me to take tests well…
and train for flight—to live space-bound.
We settled Mars in ’39,
and I led Martian Unit One.
But, oh, the things I’d left behind!
To these my mind will often run.
When orders came to sail beyond
and out to Saturn’s satellite,
through months of travel I grew fond
of time to think (and time to write)—
I’m grateful, yes, for boosters patched,
for touching down with crew intact.
The mission, though, Command has scratched
and here we wait for our extract.
Because I live now through my head
that old Greek maxim’s not abstract:
the unexamined life, it’s said,
is not worth living. That’s a fact.
The power of my tale surmounts
Kurt Vonnegut’s—or Phil K. Dick’s;
it’s my own arc that really counts.
I found myself on Saturn VI…