So long ago was the wonder turned to real by the Eagle flying by.
A child in awe I watched that miracle outside of Earth's blue sky.

In grainy black and white the world united in an up turned gaze.
To dream a unified dream for all, in those long ago heroic days.

A dream for all of mankind and your words they called it so.
Joint in belief of great achievement of how far our species could go.

You carried the heroes of a decade that paved a road up to that day.
You caught the minds of others and set new heroes on their way.

There was Mike and Buzz and you and yet others there would be.
Who would follow that first footstep that you left upon the sea.

Cloud 9
Force ten
Apollo 11

I'm high in the sky
Driven like the wind
But walking on the moon

I've become a lazy reader,
dismissive and curmudgeony too.
Magazines or books? Not magazines--
Magazine readers are a different species.

So books it is. Let me take inventory:
Nonfiction. Sorry, just the occasional science book.

General fiction lost the war for my attention--
Do real people really have so many feelings?
So often and so detailed?

So I read genre fiction.
But bang, bang adventure has become tiresome--
after all how many times and ways can you shoot/stab/blow up/car chase?

Likewise, there are books that seem spend pages and pages describing clothes.
Even though Chaucer also spent many words describing clothes,
his best lines were about bare ***** hanging out a window.

All my favorite characters are now old, Harry Bosch, George Smiley.
To my regret, the Wall falling and the Cold War ending almost wiped out the thoughtful spy story.
Science fiction, a previous favorite, took a goofy turn awhile ago, and I’m done with it.
Let's see: fantasy now seems written for teenage vampire-witch wannabes. Just flutter away.

What's left? I think it's only Detective stories and Poetry.
I'm pulling for Harry Bosch and Billy Collins at 90, and, God bless him, John Le Carre.

A poem by Billy Collins always seems to have a twist, some humor or a pun waiting to make you chuckle or stop and wonder while holding your chin.

But now, I’m not surprised by his slights of poetic hand. He has tipped his hat one too many times.
Too many winks.
One can only enjoy a twist so many times.

What would really surprise me is not a poem about jazz that is really a poem about death, or some stanza about a Bird in the winter snow (but really about a distant mother or an Ornette Coleman song or a high school sweetheart)...

What would really stop me in my tracks is

A few simple words
A haiku or prose, a
Moment for its own sake.