Don’t you mess with (1) my mother the moon
[ by Charles Cameron — first a poem, perhaps my angriest — some further disgust to follow in a subsequent post ]
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Don’t you mess with my mother the moon!
.i
Don’t you mess with my mother the moon!
Pearl.
Superb in the night sky.
Which you treat as a junkyard.ii
I am serious. I was never
more serious. This, which you thinking
life to be composed of things consider
real estate, rock,
subtly balances that other,portending at the eye
that same angle — and that other, too
you would colonize,
strip, slash, mine, burn,
rape had you the chance, were it not
so magisterial a furnace.Gold, which figures the sun
with silver the moon,
you have tapped for coinage,
despoiling hills for greed,
valleys for your convenience:
nor is your idiocy limited in reach
by anything but your idiocy.Sun and moon are married
in a wedding you cannot conceive,
to which you lack invitation
though it was offered you.
The simple light of the night sky
escapes you, neither glimpse
nor sonata troubles your soul with its ripples,for you lack, altogether,
reflection.
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I don’t much care what you do to Mars..
Oh yes, and this poem is copyright (c) Charles Cameron 2006 onwards, until we get over copyright and have freedom of quotation, imitation and variation..
January 21st, 2019 at 3:37 am
Your poem! Yes!
January 21st, 2019 at 6:04 pm
Thanks, Sally. I’m always glad to see your comments here, and particularly so today, knowing this poem — one of my own favorites — touched you.
January 22nd, 2019 at 9:13 am
You don’t much care what people do to Mars. Perhaps because Whatever was done to Mars was done long ago. I have a vague recollection -anamnesis- of a rumor that I heard whispered in a dream about a legend … about a proud and mighty race of Martians … who sailed Martian seas, dug deeply, conquered and despoiled… and dried up and died, leaving a planet barren, turning their asses to ashes and their dust a bust (and what to me is this quintessence of dust?), a civilization gone with the flow, flown away, fleeing, fled,flown, flooded and drownded in the dust they did, done and gone, whether in the dust or with the wind, now breaking, broken, broke. All gone! All good! Good bye. Good night. Good God! God is good. Bye! For now. And then, and when…All one! Dilute! Dilute! OK.
January 22nd, 2019 at 4:16 pm
Hi Stephen:
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Ha! It’s simpler for me.. The moon is precious to me because I see it, and venerate her (as per Graves’ White Goddess / muse), whereas Mars is too far for myself, or Li Bo, or most other nin-astronomer poets to see, so..
.
Besides which, my old Christ Church chum, Frederick Turner, he of the books on beauty, has an epic poem about terraforming Mars, so I feel as though that territory is already taken, so to speak…