Now Playing–Apollo 11

Saved my tears
for the very end–
safe splashdown.

#NaPoWriMo, Day 6

First steps

It clears the tower

It clears the tower,
and we watch it go, ribbon
waving at its feet.

Crescent Home

You’ve only been away a week

and yet you stare
at the terminator
on your crescent home

and a shadow falls
over a place
you know.

Tranquility

Sleep
is on the schedule,
but the moon dust
is bright as a city
outside the window,
and your childhood stars
have been erased.

So you wait out
the rest period
in the one good spot
on the floor
with your eyes open

and let peace tuck in
under blankets
240,000 miles away.

 

In awe we watched the moon-bound go

Spectators on a Florida beach await the launch of Apollo 11.

keep looking back

This year marks the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission. Apollo 11 launched July 16, 1969 and landed on the Moon on July 20.  Pictured here the Saturn V rocket that launched Apollo 11 to the Moon and a cut-out image of Aldrin on the Moon. (Images credit: NASA)

A collaborative haiku — “To The Moon”

Renga is a form of collaborative haiku with a 5-7-5-7-7 syllable structure. A single writer initiates the poem with the first 5-7-5 stanza and welcomes other writers to provide the 7-7 stanza.

Anyone can submit the 7-7 lines! For the sake of all renga participants, please include your lines as comments to the collaborative haiku post so that others can see what has been submitted. I will “close” the renga to submissions on the date indicated with the collaborative haiku post.  I will have an independent judge pick their favorite from the submissions. The final renga will be published on this blog, and the submitter will be given co-credit with me in the by-line.

The submission deadline is early this time: 5 pm EDT, Fri, August 31, 2012.  My hope is to post the final haiku on NASA’s “Share Your Thoughts on Neil Armstrong” page at http://www.nasa.gov/topics/people/features/armstrong_comments.html before the public comment period ends.

_________________________________________________________

Apollo 11 astronauts (left to right: Armstrong, Collins, Aldrin) at Kennedy Space Center (Saturn V in the background) on May 20, 1969. Credit: NASA

To The Moon

We choose to go, too,
because your words awaken
a slumbering child.
Your 7 syllable line here
Next 7 syllable line here.

Step

One of few pictures of Neil Armstrong on the Moon. Taken by Buzz Aldrin, July 20, 1969. Credit: NASA.

— for Neil, with thanks

A step
before I was born
led to another

and another

until a path
wore through the book
on our shelf

and I sat on the floor
with black-and-white
family portraits

of the moon

as if reliving
a vacation
to the beach

this intimacy
treading
into the night
when I trained
my binoculars
on a black sea
stripped of childhood
haze–

on a suspended
rock, falsely lit

and somewhere
in my focus:
a step.