Moon
Posted on 2005-06-07 at 08:02
Gliding o'er a simple line
and floating toward her home
The fair faced Luna, aquiline,
Has wandered thus alone.
Breathing life in every man,
from savage to savant.
With each wax and with each wan,
thy visage we avaunt.
To legend, lore and mytheme all
thy globed form gave birth.
And yet each night that form doth fall
below the lowly earth.
Joshua, in vaunted tower,
did bid thy bulk be still.
And shaken by thy mystic power
"the mariner hath his will."
In Thoth, thy son, was time thus reined.
And through thy cycling walk
was future's fortune therein gained
---Urania's tongueless talk.
Yet man now seeks to bind,
through mathematics grand,
thy ellipse path as traced behind
thy transcendental hand.
Kepler and Copernicus
have seized thy conic course
and through the beaded abacus
have bound thy boundless force
The sacred tales of midnight dance,
which science did supplant,
gave thee a giant's countenance
yet now thou seemst an ant.
Perhaps 'tis true that Thor should run
from circling blades that sciences spin,
They've deadened Luna---her form undone---
to deconstruct the myths within.
In days of yore thy wizard's spell
would earth's clear waters reprimand,
enjoining tides to sink and swell
and march unto thy stern command.
Neptune, too, then bent his ear
to hear thy waves crash louder;
The foam and strand, afar and near,
crushing rock to powder.
Lifting high my telescope
and watching as you sink,
I howl a simple hymn of hope
that man might stop to think.
For should he mull and ponder long
about these things he's done,
then he, like me, might raise a song
to lift thee o'er the sun.
For unlike us who'll fade away,
as nature runs her race,
thy corpus yet will always stay
to grant the tides their pace.
-Tom Caudron
-Inspired by my apathy toward humanity (it was a bad semester of college!)