~GAYLORD BREWER~

APOLOGIA TO MARS AND MOON

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          Let me be what awaited me yesterday, and let me resist
          tomorrow in a fistful of poppies and dust.

                                         —Pablo Neruda

To right, from lone perspective, the moon waxing
one night from full; to left, the red planet
closer than it has been for sixty thousand years,
will be again for a hundred lifetimes.  A man
prone on a pallet of wood, hard, but not hardness
of stone, surety, rather of a conversation
of bone and flesh, tree transformed to function.
Let us not discuss nations, ages, intrusions,
nor when this moment will fall and disappoint.
For now the man studies—genuflects, if you will—
beneath two salient stones, magnetic, exquisitely
aligned amid otherwise opaque argument.
In an instant, a glance, a dream, they will remove
together behind a scrim of black bough.  But what
matter happens then, what happened next?
 
 

© by Gaylord Brewer