We ventured into the unknown to meet the heralded son
The offspring of the Winged Messenger and Beauty Incarnate
His name promised freedom, ecstasy,
The taste of forbidden fruit,
The comfort in believing its flesh brought Heaven
rather than Sin.
We heard of His power to heal, the seduction of his embrace
In visage and spirit, He takes after his Mother.
Let His Name Echo Across the Cosmos:
We Yearn for Eros! We Search for the God of Love!
These are the myths we tell ourselves
To brace our souls
Against the unrelenting cold;
Against the impenetrable darkness;
Against the unyielding creep of eternal solitude;
Out there, we say, lies Hope. Out there, we say, lies love.
His Name is Eros!
What is there to be found? Not a god, not a muse,
Not the Holy Child of Mercury and The Goddess of Lovers,
We find a near earth asteroid.
One smaller than expected,
with two medium sized craters,
and an unremarkable density, one not unlike the Earth's crust.
The lies we tell ourselves.
We came back to Earth,
All of Us Changed
By Our Rendezvous with The Love God
That We all were changed, is an unshakeable truth
A Constant.
Yet Our Stories of that Encounter
Will never reconcile.
Some saw betrayal,
A sharp knife, the jagged edge of shattered expectations, Dressed in the form of an ugly celestial body.
Some saw an impostor,
believing Eros to dance amongst those Stars
That glint down upon us,
Too far from our reach.
Some saw nothing,
Their eyes entirely disbelieving,
Unable to grasp the weight of our error.
I saw what I saw.
I know it changed me.
I have my Truth tattooed upon me.
Eros, in His unadorned splendour,
Lives in my Soul.
Artistic rendition of 433 Eros, the first asteroid to be orbited by a spacecraft and the first to be landed upon by a spacecraft.