I thought myself chosen
as the moon kept pace with our car
speeding home through the night
my sister’s squabbling
before falling asleep
I told no one of how the moon
was watching me
occasionally, hiding behind clouds
but always reappearing
the face of the man in the moon
communing with me
By teenage years
I knew the truth
the moon was, well, just a moon
a celestial body orbiting the Earth
sloshing its waters around
to create the tides
and allegedly influencing
lunatics and mayhem
in the general population
If a god had made the world
then what a trickster
to make the circumference
of the Moon, the same
as the Sun seen from Earth
giving rise to panic-inducing
eclipses when peoples as primitive
as my younger self
felt their personal connection
to the god’s of the heavens
imperilled
Eventually, I owned a telescope
and gazed at the moon afresh
as it moved slowly across
my field of view, its details
craters and “seas” in sharp relief
and at the outside of the sphere
the crater walls visible as
a ragged edge and I saw
with newfound clarity
that we live on a planet
with a companion moon
in the vast space
between the stars
and I was once more in awe…
© Andrew Wilson, 2026
Over at dVerse Poets Pub, Dora in Poetics, invites us to write about the night and the night sky in particular…