Moondust Poem by Robert Rorabeck

Tourists on the moon
Go to take pictures of a sky always cloudless—
They notice there are no houses on the moon
And no pools to swim in.
Rather, instead, everyone goes slowly on
The moon, like lazy Ferris wheels,
The earliest hopes that would easily die in thicker atmospheres;
Their hearts
Are so light for a little while,
But even stepping as they do, like butterflies
Try to learn to walk, they soon grow morose
Looking with powerful binoculars down to
Their far away counterparts down
On the blue earth;
They feel like they have become ghosts—
And they are quickly bored,
Because there on the moon there is
Nothing yet to do, but to stare into space
Which really is nothing, anyway—
The moon might be beautiful to look at,
They say, but like a wild horse, it is dangerous
And boring….
There are no shopping malls on the moon,
And there is always something to do
In shopping malls….
So they eagerly wait in fat queues for the shuttle
To come back over and return them to earth—
Already they are thinking about what’s on TV,
And they are hungry for fast food drive-throughs
And pizza deliveries,
And they don’t even mind so much that there
Are bills waiting for them, and taxes to be paid—
That’s all part of life, they say, and wonder
Why they ever spent money to take this trip
In the first place—
There are always good things to do back on earth,
The tourist think: there are always
Horses to be bet on and ladies to get laid….
So they go away from the moon in one mighty
Burst of petrol, floating flames…
Leaving only the smell of their farts—

Then we come out, me and you and all
The phosphorescent things which only live here
And deep under the sea, the two places where
They can be left alone, swimmingly—
We are so glad they left,
Me and you and our moon,
And we take long waltzes in low gravity
With the earth like a shimmering pearl
In shallow water, winking just
Over our shoulder—Down there,
Where all the professionals busy about
And in their downtime they are called tourists,
But we will never be tourists,
So how can we ever be professions,
Being what we are being all the time….
We take long walks on our moon which is
A treeless park, and swim in the waterless pools,
With the airy fish only we can see,
And when we are finished we walk into a
Home made of wisp and hope, that you
Told me was there and I believed you,
So we walked in together and lived….
Living in this lonely space with the light
Of the stars, we kiss each other breathlessly
As we dance like ghosts in love
Through the bits of moon-dust
Shivering like torpid curtains that close
At the end of a tragic play
No one sticks around to see….