Waning Eearth Poem by Luiz Angélico da Costa

WANING EARTH
Luiz Angélico
(Salvdor, Bahia, Brazil)

It's the morning after the 20th July,1969.
I'm riding on a bus along the outsskirts
of the old city, trying to catch sights
of ordinary day living outside the dew-blurred
windows of the bus, thinking of the day before
when the news struck the Earth: Man on the Moon!

Somewhere about the rugged coastline
the bus stops short in front of a row of miserable huts
where an angry man at one door
is cursing his own woman and their child,
'What's that poor devil doing in the rain? '

The bus moves onward and I keep recalling
those two men's dancing up there in the void
while down here in the gutter
such plain common street scenes
as smeared scraps of a yesterday paper's headlines
- MAN ON THE MOON and MAD K, ILLER ON MAIN STREET -
attract a hungry cat

and at a distance
an old woman cries to a pregnant young missy,
'You've got no business calling your baby
after that gringo's name - which neither you
nor nobody here can spell or properly say-
and before it's born too! '

But the child with the balloon under her underclothes
snaps back, 'It's my baby and I'll name it what I want.'

The bus then lurches ahead and I start drafting a poem
and it comes out somewhat like this:

men on the moon men on the moon - Man on the Moon!
waning earth looming hneavens
lightest feet deserted hearts
Never an identical horizon towards which
your anguished silence to turn or the desperate
hope of going onto- where, Man - the Moon?
And then what?

Yet then and now I think the real poem
was not made, and now and then I wonder
what the poor devil was (is) doing in the rain
or no rain, if he's still living, or what-

And I wonder
what on earth is doing on the moon