Dave Bonta's "Colonist" is a tiny poem with a big worry packed inside it. The speaker imagines a person who has gone to Mars, a place we tend to picture as a fresh start, and who then wonders whether they'll simply be ordinary there too. The opening line, "where sin and creed play," suggests the old human baggage of guilt, belief and moral struggle. The poem seems to ask whether those things travel with us wherever we go.
The speaker's feeling reads as a mix of weariness and prayer. "O Lord must I / be ordinary too" sounds half like a plea and half like a complaint. There's a hint that the speaker might want to be rescued from sameness, or perhaps that even a whole new planet can't offer escape from being human.
The mood is quiet, wry and a little deflated. The short, broken lines make the question feel private, almost whispered, set against the vast distance of space.