26 July 2004

MICHAEL COLLINS ORBITS THE MOON     I am elected watchman. It's my lot to turn and turn about in my tiny cradle.  Not my fortune or my obligation to first-foot the moon or talk of it to nations.   Not for me grey beach or empty ocean, not for me earthlight or the silent locomotion of the stars.  Uncrowded by the voices of the world I slip away.  The world rejoices   and I fold myself into the secret night behind the moon.  Afloat in amniotic light I remain an embryo, a diagramme, a plan. This egg will carry me unborn while man   takes giant steps below.  But unevolved, unhatched, Columbia and I become initials scratched on incomprehensible darkness.  I’m serene in my awful solitude, turning through this lane between   the impassive weight of galaxies and the husk of the moon.  I close my eyes; a kind of dusk prevails, half-recollection of diurnal time, a rhythm bound into the rhyme   of seasons.  And I dream of the grass of prairies, lost highways that pass, relentless and unbending, by abandoned outposts, forts and chapels, and dead cowtowns whose brave boothill ghosts   still ride the range; the empty-hearted homesteads whose screendoors still bang on windy nights; dry riverbeds enclosed by old barbed wire, and oil-well donkeys, one end gazing at the sand, the other at the stars.  Trails bend   and turn upon themselves and men and women pause inside their journeys, build fences, write down laws amd call their scratches in the sand Jerusalem. But clear night brings the stars - still over Bethlehem   or singing like a choir in Cassiopeia.  And I ride Columbia back into the blue scrutiny of earth. The tide of their voices wakes me and I invoke the charter of my race: small steps like mine are mighty steps, ad inexplorata.     This poem too has been submitted to constant revision in an attempt to achieve a comfortable relationship between rhythm & rhyme. The struggle continues...   10:54:48 PM    Mmm? []

© Copyright 2004 Dick Jones. Last update: 01/08/2004; 23:45:36.