Pale Doom

 

Oh, perfect Hunter's Moon, your grandness signals the room, to believe in you, in all that you do, to rescue us from this gloom.
Oh, rising October Moon,
May you Enlighten us soon, as soon as can be, to help us to remember that first cosmic boom.
Oh, distant Mars, you wrestle with the stars, to shine your light, help brighten the darkest night, and to ward off a pale doom.

Call to the trumpeter,
On high see great Jupiter.
You bring battle to my space, so in your face.
So bright in the eastern sky, the apple of my eye.
As to rhyming this poem, you make me forget why.

RM, 10-21-2022.

In an attempt to honor Jupiter,
[I can think of nothing stupider.]


As a July-born moonchild, I often gaze at and reflect upon the moon's solitary life in the vast and infinite cosmos.  I follow the Moon phases and try to locate it whenever I can.

As a historian with a decent grasp of important AND mundane events and anniversaries, December brings us 50 years back to 1972. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration sent its Apollo 17 to the Moon.
It was the sixth mission to land on the Moon and to return to Earth safely.
12 men have walked on the Moon, the last, Commander Eugene Cernan, left on December 14, 1972.  The Apollo 17 mission was epic, as it conducted scores of experiments and drove a lunar rover over many miles on three lunar excursions (EVAs).
Cernan was joined on the lunar surface by Geologist Harrison Schmitt, as Command Module pilot Ronald Evans circled the Moon, waiting to again rendezvous with the Lunar Module astronauts.
Financial reconsiderations and societal malaise told Americans that the Moon was no longer a national goal, no longer a destination to cherish, embrace, learn from, mine, and colonize.
Why we didn't return is anybody's guess.
Maybe we were told not to return. We may not be alone. Ooooooooooh...

The RM archive possesses autographed photographs of the Gemini 9 mission patch, and a postcard of Eugene Cernan driving the Apollo 17 Lunar Rover.

So, this December 2022, remember our last Moon landing, a half-century ago.