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Total Lunar Eclipse, 21 December 2010

 

                        For Lynn Powers and her painting Ode to Moon

 

 

 

For months we forget about you

while your blue light tries to pry

through the bedroom blinds

to enter our dreams.

 

            *

 

Dark side of the moon, the unseen,

my teacher

also illuminated by the sun.

 

            *

 

Again you are the shape of a curved needle

for the wounds in my side

as I search for my country

           

            within my country

 

                        year after year

 

absence and questions             the sutures

 

            secured and absorbed.

 

            *

 

Once again we hit you,

this time with a Centaur rocket

in search of water in a crater.

 

In order to analyze the ejecta,

your shepherd destroys itself.

 

            *

 

’67? Or was it ’68? September

when they orbited the moon

secured in their Zond capsule

and surviving reentry, splashdown.

Those two Russian

steppe tortoises

where are they now?

Nameless, those two. Let them

outlive me.

 

            *

 

Quiet. Smoke

rising towards the moon

will also teach us

how to travel.

 

 

 

 

 

© Robert S. Pesich, all rights reserved. This poem first appeared in Aperçus Quarterly, Issue 2.2, November, 2012