Europa

What lies beneath your frozen crust,
your patchwork quilt --
ten miles thick, hard as steel,
fractured into icebergs
floating on a warmer sea beneath?

You are child of Jupiter,
a jealous Cyclops
regarding you for aeons,
His singular blood-red eye
storming madly past your face.

How awful your captor's grip,
tearing loose your innards,
heating rock to lava,
warming the water sea
inside your frozen shell.

In that frothing inner cauldron,
elements of life would boil
free from molten pits
of sulfur, carbon further down,
and in the fuel of heat
build molecules, then cells.

What leviathans swim blindly
through your yawning water caverns
and scrape the bottom fringe,
the ice stalactites,
dangling like loose threads
from a blanket
beyond which stars and planets sleep?

Scott Speck
09/09/2000