from A Concise History of the Moon
III New
Every dome we built is overgrown with tendrils,
They say the time to civilize our satellite
Is coming soon;
Architects and doctors, planners with their pencils
Design and theorize and calibrate
For living-room.
Thinking stops the blood, a mounting terror festers,
The leaving of a land is no small sacrifice
Even for us;
Seldom in the drunkest dreams of our ancestors
Could such an odyssey have been devised
We dare at last.
Trapped between the smell of history and stasis,
We plot a future where forgetfulness will cross
The crescent Earth;
Children we encounter (ours or something else’s)
Will seek in vain within their glossaries
The word for birth.
Alex Skovron
‘A Concise History of the Moon’ was previously published in Towards the Equator: New & Selected Poems (Puncher & Wattmann, 2014)
Photos in collage from: CSIRO CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0) via Wikimedia Commons