La luna è bella!

The moon is beautiful!

Look how it shines!
See how it glows!
So alive!
So powerful and strong!

but little do they know…

i appear to have my mojo working
i seem to have it all going on
it looks like everything is more than well with me
and that i’m living la dolce vita
i dance the night away with all sorts of heavenly bodies
i revolve with the best of them
many tell me they envy me – and even more think it

yet who is this who is jealous of me?
they’re my age and married, they’re my age and settled down,
they’re my age and have a steady routine of drinking coffee, reading the paper, working 9 to 5, and coming home to their partner and their kids, and watching tv
they’re the salt of the earth working stiffs,
family guys and gals who haven’t had a date night in many moons
they see me and are in awe
they read of my exploits and yearn to be as carefree and unfettered,
to live with lunar abandon
to have a tidal passion that waxes and wanes with such force
they think the grass is surely greener on all sides of the moon

they fail to see that they are the ones who are really living!
they are the ones who get things done!
they are the ones who bring life into the cosmos and nurture it
they are the ones who have the green grass
they are the ones who are really alive!
they fail to see is that it is i who is envious of them!
that i’d give away all of my towering mountain ranges
and my supposed seas of tranquility
to be… them
to be my brother earth
to be sister terra
to be that big organic blue-green orb that can cry actual oceans of tears
to be …you

we shared a common birth those many years ago
as a tiny cosmic dust-bunny in the empty dark ether
we collected more and more big bang debris
and the more star-stuff we amassed,
the more came our way
we spun and grew until we were a noble proto-planet proudly circling the sun

until that bitch theia slammed into us like a celestial bat out of hell

– for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction –
and in this case, a divorce
we were split apart and a chunk of firmament was sent hurling out into space

i was such a small lump of matter

separated from the vitality of the shifting tectonic plates and molten lava flows

relegated to the cold, unlike you, i have no toasty core
no fire in my belly to make me blow cat blow
nothing but moonrock
nothing but moondust
nothin’ much at all…
a mute mineral satellite with no light of its own
an orbiting desolate alcatraz
a white washed tomb in the sky

yet now brother-sister earth,
with cosmic irony,
you look up at night
and you romanticize me,
you sing incantations under me,
you dance under me,
you kiss under me,
you make love under me,
you wish you were me

La luna è bella!
La luna è bella!

ma la luna è morto

… but the moon is dead….

and it’s eclipsed by your shadow

if terrestrial lunatics find me beautiful,
it is only because you see yourself reflected by me

i am only a mirror

– roger wolsey
written under an auspicious blue moon just before midnight on Dec. 31, 2009 on the occasion of the last day of the year, spent alone at home (mostly by choice) for the first time in 18 years. In the Eastern Hemisphere, they could see that blue moon being eclipsed by the Earth’s shadow.  The poem also celebrates the earth and is made public on Earth Day, 2010.

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