To Venus for Valentine’s Day

In search of love’s truth we travel fast and far,
loaded with scopes on modern Venera’s and Vega’s,
to plunder the domain of night’s brightest non-star,
for Rusalka, Billie and Garland we’re far too eager.
Below heavy sulphuric clouds, a wondrous red sphere.
Our freighter is chewed and steamed and drenched by acid.
We reconsider if love could exist in a place so sere,
and spy Arachnoid’s caught in a web created by our grid.
Solar heat trapped below clouds reheats already hot basalt,
heated lava drains from the center of many craters.
Life on Venus is a passionate embrace hard to halt.
But we are safe, protected by our freighter’s ablators
and the lesson of missing craters makes a light go on in our head.
Venus’s love enfolds any entrance bomb and brings them abed.