After I thumbed a ride I saw you
in the passenger window, more
than a crescent, almost half.
It was getting dark, and a voice
on the car radio was reporting
that Neil Armstrong had stepped
onto the Sea of Tranquility.
He was walking there in the dust.
Five times more, men visited,
two at a time. Some of them
lowered moon buggies out of a bay
in the side of the lander. These
they unfolded and took for a spin.
Flower children of my generation
thought that the men were middle-aged,
and they were, but they were children too.
They left moon buggies in your lap.
I wanted to tell you last year,
when I saw you in the bare limbs
at your narrowest crescent
next to the morning star,
and just this fall when you were large
and bright as I had ever seen:
to consider you in the night sky is
to release the mind more deeply into itself.
If Earth is alive, you were alive
when these men lived on you.
When they left you died,
and they plunged living into the sea.
- Brooks Haxton