Moon Landing +50

It rained most of that week

So we couldn’t see it anyway

with the naked eye

And the grainy TV imagery

and the muffled voices

From a quarter million miles away

This orbed story seeming so alien

to my lifeguard lifestyle

and the big concert

Coming up in a couple weeks

over in New York State

Or that moony girl

who kept draping herself

         on my white guard stand,

Recalling that when Apollo was announced

We believed what the President said

before Vietnam

And Watergate and stagflation

Opened a continental latrine trench

Between the government

and the people,

Nearly failing to mention that this was only

another Frontier story

another land grab

Of empty spaces occupied by nothing

or mere heathens thus

Ripe for that special Christian rapacity

         forgiven in advance

for bringing the Word

to the wilderness,

Awakening too late to the bitterly plain

         truth that that savage

wisdom is what we needed

All along to keep this singular

blue pearl

From becoming a charcoal-dusted

cratered place

Where a white man’s bootprint

lasts a million years.

          © Bill Prindle, 2019

Apollo 11 bootprint, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons