"email from dav 5" by Valerie Valdary Higgins

The days are the wrong length, it's tiring.
The routine seems to go on the same,
But month by month, can we call them months here?
The atmosphere becomes more humane.

The acid levels are slowly coming down,
It is safe to feel the air on your skin.
Off duty staff take oxy-flasks and go out naked,
For those few minutes after the sun goes in.

At full dark they run back in shivering,
Glad to get to their coveralls and boots,
Night crews floodlight the scene and hasten their run,
With a chorus of wolfcalls and hoots.

Now that is our sophisticated social life,
The only time we go unsuited outside.
Night time is bitterly, bitterly cold.
If you go out in sun you'll be fried.

At night we take out tracked vehicles,
To lay out seeded webbing in the cold,
Over isulpaks of nematodes and worm eggs,
Earthworms are worth more here than gold.

The webbing fibres catch at the frost,
Then keep the moisture from the blast of the day.
When you must build soil from dust over rocks,
You can't let the dust blow away.

The work is hard, dirty and boring,
But we are living so close to the brink.
If we succeed, then what our children will see!
Its worth giving up the hard drink.

Sometimes through a UV shielded window,
When dawn frost lifts away from the scene,
Here and there in the more sheltered corners,
We can see the first pockets of green.

I miss theatres and nightclubs and dancing,
Sometimes missing you all makes me low.
But I'm here on a world where all life is new,
And I'm seeing the first green shoots grow.