I know you’re just
a dead pearl
orbiting the earth,
no life in your dust,
only frozen water
pockets and craters
deep as oceans
of stone shadows,
and yet—
We humans give you
a thousand names
and legends, we whisper
our wishes to you in
the night and imagine
you blessing them silver
in your heart before
sending them back to us,
here on Earth—
But I know
we ground-bound beings
will never match your
airy purity, even if
we seize your matchless
cool heights in the heavens,
we will always remain
doomed by the gravity
of our own thoughts.
I would ask you
how blissful it is
to float free and
unencumbered
by blood, brain or bone,
but you have no mouth,
no lunar maw for hunger
or celestial hate, only
the quiet serenity of a crisp
and uncaring, ultimately
unknowable orb.
Thank you
for shining down
on me.
You don’t need
to say anything—
merely, beam
as you were,
sheen as you are,
moon above,
me below.
Sometimes you can feel a poem coming on like a storm front. Every bone in your body aches with tectonic weight. All the things you truly want to say garble and gravel in your mouth. You feel like your heart might wrench and shudder to a stop in your chest with just one more beat. And then the ink gushes onto the page in keenest relief, the most sacred words racing free first—
Moon above.
I’m forever grateful for the moon’s companionship, a shining constant throughout humankind’s earliest memories and records. Technically, our lunar satellite is ever so slowly slipping away from Earth’s orbit at a rate of about one and half inches per year (*until it becomes tidally locked some fifty billion years from now). But I know that at least for my tiny blip of a life span, the moon will always shine with familiar closeness as it tugs at the sea foam like a blanket—tugging free secrets that lie deeper than marrow, too.
In gazing upon this imperturbable sphere, I subconsciously give it my calm; the peace I cannot always carry in my mortal frame. For sometimes, when pain is reduced to its basest form, only a shivering silence remains—a quiet that the silver rays of the moon purify beyond even the gentle gravity of tears.
The full moon rolls across the horizon like a pearl, and really, these two orbs are not so unlike. A pearl exists only because of damage when an irritant is trapped and layered over with a relentless aura of iridescence. The moon, too, is the product of an incandescent synestia sparked by the violent destruction of a young Earth, a visible wound just wider than a thousand miles. In their essence, both the moon and a pearl are identical twins, damage-born.
The moon mirrors the daylight in softer hues. Yet it also draws the wildest whims from humans by reflecting our mind’s light, illuminating all our wishes from the inside-out—even the ones we’ve forgotten how to speak aloud on Earth.
According to NASA, the distance in miles between our planet and the moon is roughly thirty Earths. Yet sometimes, that incredible distance seems almost bridgeable by foot!
Perhaps my favorite memory of the moon rests in a one-hundred-year-old farm in Utah. My family only rented the home there for one year as the owner later sold the property to a company that bulldozed it to make shoddy subdivisions with high plastic white fences. But between the ages of 12-13, the vast field with a gnarled orchard behind the house was my favorite playground. And one night, the moon rose purple as a magical amethyst over this childhood field of dreams.
I didn’t know then that atmospheric conditions were at play with this ethereal trick of light. It seemed as if a portal to another dimension was opening overhead, perhaps to Narnia or Middle Earth! My sisters and I ran like feral ghosts through the field, howling up at this strange purple moon (*The sugar rush from A&W Root Beers might’ve also contributed to this sudden spike of euphoria). There was no one to tell us to be quiet. No one watching but the glowing orb above. Cloaked in the moon-bright night air, it felt as if one mighty leap would take me all the way to this mysterious jewel in the sky!
And if one day, humanity ceases to exist on Earth whether by our own catastrophe or the random sidereal whims of the universe, perhaps the collective psychic imprint of all our wishes and dreams will linger in the selenic dust. Perhaps some other minds will read these whispers, and cherish everything we once loved and lost, too.
*If you enjoyed this poem, you might also enjoy the ink scribblings
in my debut poetry collection, Tangible Creatures.
subscribe to my Substack account here.
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