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

I Sing the Body Politic; A Sestina for Election Day

I am discovering with trepidation

that no age is old enough to learn about

the fragility of the human body.

The ripple of ribs flowing under the oar

of a collarbone. Heart underneath, beating

lopsided. Like a bird with a fractured wing.

What does it matter that I live in a swing

state when I can barely discern a nation? 

My myopic mind’s eye... a system’s beating

pulse appears inconsequential to a bout

of arrythmia in my own red or-

gan. Does a vote cast extend my own body?

But I fill out my ballot. Sing the body

politic. Watch the neighbor woman’s child swing

her legs under the chair outside the booth. Or

maybe she was dancing the demarcation

between body;(s) and body;(pl). A quote about

choices ("Life is the sum of"- Camus)  beating

in my mind, I see her pink clad feet beating

Choice’s shroud one day; the weight of a body

reduced to moment.  Life's meaning now about

pen on paper. Four more years of her swinging

from this self definition; the duration

of plural breath. We are drowning in infor-

mation, but starved in knowledge. Stumbling left or

right hoping to choose wisely. Daily beating

down wisdom’s door in the itching temptation

to choose well. Make us proud of our one body.

To not be the one standing in the swinging

Door of truth forgetting what it’s all about.

Is it all about me;(s)? Or is it about

me;(pl)? Do I belong to myself? Any more

confusion and my profile might simply wing

into blue like asphalt lines off of beating

heat. Then I shall no longer be named body.

Just anybody. Call me Population.

And yet, something about the still-strong beating

carotid thrills. Or maybe it’s your body  

adjacent, winging me to denotation.  

     © Sarah Fletcher, 2013

Voting in the United States
Photo by Tom Arthur
from Wikimedia Commons