I was three, four--surely no more
we marched through the old city, I
mostly on father's shoulders, a place
I was perched so often back then
of a thousand dry seas on the moon's
pocked face, only one my father chose to wed
with a bomb crater: Mare Ingenii
to others, you were but a mammoth hole,
ill-timed casualty of the bombers wrath,
but Dad named you for a barren basin
on the dark side of the moon
eons later, I was an ancient ten,
and John Glenn spun thrice around the globe
I then asked if we would live to see the real you,
an astronomically sculpted scoop, two hundred
arctic black miles across
dad said of course,
and I believed him, especially
after I asked when, and he said
a billion years ago
Oct 19, 2015
Oct 19, 2015 at 9:39 PM UTC
I was three, four--surely no more
we marched through the old city, I
mostly on father's shoulders, a place
I was perched so often back then
of a thousand dry seas on the moon's
pocked face, only one my father chose to wed
with a bomb crater: Mare Ingenii
to others, you were but a mammoth hole,
ill-timed casualty of the bombers wrath,
but Dad named you for a barren basin
on the dark side of the moon
eons later, I was an ancient ten,
and John Glenn spun thrice around the globe
I then asked if we would live to see the real you,
an astronomically sculpted scoop, two hundred
arctic black miles across
dad said of course,
and I believed him, especially
after I asked when, and he said
a billion years ago
*Mare Ingenii is a crater, “The Sea of Cleverness,” on the far side of the moon. In the decade after WWII, my father actually showed me a bomb crater in Vienna, not Dresden.
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