Field Poems from Mars on Earth

Mount Teide on the Canary Island of Tenerife is the highest peak in Spain, at 12,188 feet. And the third largest 
volcano in the world. It is considered active but hasn’t blown since 1909. 

There is an otherworldly element to it. NASA worked with Spanish aerospace experts on Teide to build a prototype 
for the data-gathering robot called Perseverance that would eventually rove Mars. There are several areas near the 
peak where researchers from Teide’s observatory have created plaques that detail its surface similarity to the red 
planet, and the moon.

When working on a book about deadly African migration routes to reach the shores of Tenerife, I took a break to 
contemplate what should be our shared earth from the island’s highest point. 

		
                                                       I.

Dry wind carves
the air, marbled 

desert rock 
recreates this old
planet

A lesson in form: hostility sculpts survival

A detail from flora: the branches here are tough
do not snap at 
one pull

their terpenes pilot the breeze
like fire

Sun tells me		 the tree’s body heals as it lives


                                                       II.

The lava dried 
crunchy
stacked high red
in splash frozen pillars

nature palaces reign 
from the time
when verticality
had no prior aesthetic hold;

when gravity had the courage to play

Now this knobby earth 
blankets its history 

in strata that
weaves patterns like
the unwound red strands
of my black braids 


                                                    III.

I told myself 
before I die I want 
to daze 
with the milky way up 
close

let her drop to the horizon on a dark sky night
with a new moon and no light

I want to be small
               slight like dust 				                     on the shoe of the universe

The circular sky
formless and deep
calls

Each star a wink, each point 
a praise

But just then two satellites start roving
making their manmade pace obvious 			  as meteors whiz tracers
through the void 

They watch me 
as I avert my gaze 
                                                                                           tired, in protest

Each meanders in the other’s orbit

Leaving me to question whether I should still feel
the gut drop of awe

Author of the article

Duana Fullwiley is an anthropologist whose writings explore the liveliness of the body, the ways we communicate through the natural environment, and the cultural intricacies of how people express normalcy and disease. Her award-winning nonfiction books include The Enculturated Gene (Princeton, 2011) and Tabula Raza (University of California, 2024), which have won the Amaury Talbot Prize (2013), the Robert Textor and Family Prize (2014), the Diana Forsythe Prize (2024) and the C. Wright Mills Award (2025). Her poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in Ars Medica, The Boston Review, La Revue des Sciences Sociales, and have also been anthologized in the collection Black Rootedness (Elyssar, 2022). Nominated for a 2023 Pushcart Prize, her poems were selected by the West Oakland to West Africa poetry exchange to be performed in the stage play Lake Walking: Revolutionary Talking for the 2024 San Francisco International Arts Festival. Most recently, she has collaborated with two visual artists for Portland, Oregon’s 2025 Ekphraestival for the group show Intertwined. Fullwiley is a professor of anthropology at Stanford University where she bridges fields of humanities, the medical arts and various sciences in lecture courses, seminars and writing workshops.