Poem: Back to the Moon..
For me not thee, but still for humanity..
We’re going back
back to the Apollo era
back to human eyes at Luna
back to views of our blue marble
and back to bombing its civilians
Back to the horrors of Vietnam
in the schools of Iran
while lunar astronauts look back
“for all humanity”
We’re going back
with a translunar injection burn
while leveling buildings in Lebanon
in that same duration
We’re going back
back to taking pains
for ensuring lunar crew safety
but not the missile precision
that avoids civilian casualty
We’re going back
for all humanity, they say
back for cosmic aspiration
not the million displaced children;
isolate them, they may
for it inspires them not thee anyway
Are we going back
for that overview effect
or the elite overlook defect?
For the children who weep Earth’s blue
remain unresolved in that 4K overview
We’re so going back
back to little sense of humility
back to preserve the future of hypocrisy
where local diversity trumps international adversity
back to this lunacy bundled as humanity
We’re so going back
back to placing life on dead terrain
while the non-barren see bombs rain
amid dangling threats from a president
of nuking one’s civilization in an instant
This whole disgrace
is not the promise of space
Let’s go back—nay—forward
to a crescent embrace
but only from our better place.
Notes: Even as NASA finally launched humans to the Moon for the first time in over five decades, its juxtaposition with the in-parallel US and Israeli military strikes killing and displacing children in Iran and the Middle East does not reinforce the mission’s propagated claim of going to the Moon “for all humanity”. Many of us would’ve been way more excited about Artemis II if it also didn’t overlap with a million children weeping.
If you liked this space poetry of mine, read Seven uni-verses, my globally published poetry pamphlet.
