Moon Poems, by M.C. Childs

A lithograph from The New York Sun newspaper Aug 25, 1835 illustrating the purported Vespertilio-homo (bat people) in the Ruby Amphitheater of the Moon.

The Great Moon Hoax 

Lunar goats, tame unicorns,
Vespertilio-homo
bat about the noosphere,
in some shadow of Eden, 
as substantial as Sherlock
on the cobbles of London.

We will build a lunar vale
for gliding in one-sixth G,
and for the delight that lit 
the Great Moon Hoax, christen it
The Ruby Amphitheater.

We will fly.

Émile-Antoine Bayard's illustrations for Around the Moon by Jules Verne (1870)

Lagrange Points

Splendeur…
Vector sum of manifold tides, 
sum of covalent harmonics, 
derivative of whispers 
amongst our ancestral stars, 
sensitive to quantum flux, 
Our true weight is incalculable.

Field Columbian Museum West Court Alcove 103. 1898. Model by Johann Friedrich Julius Schmidt, Germany. https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/field-columbian-museum-1894-1920

Attending Luna

Swiss on rye, a pickle, and stout for lunch.
Yet I am the Chief Warden of the Moon.

The flood tide of the reverent and irreverent -
all eager to touch a crater’s wine-glass rim,
the flow of a sea, to caress the Moon -
ebbed with the close of the White City.

Now, it’s schools of school trips, stray professors,
and the odd ones – tall, lanky, wary,
sketching lines and loci in the air
with long fingers, offbeat languages.

Sometimes from the corner of my eye,
from the corner of my mind, I see
lights of cities, the run of railways,
spires taller than the Moon is wide.

I am the Chief Warden of the Moon. 
I attend its silvery magic. 

Apollo 10, NASA

The Pursuit
Hexagram Tui, The Joyous

The math is clear      the weather fine
a good day to leave the world
thunder up to the silence

Suited up                   pat Snoopy
the pursuit of happiness
is not just fine math, clear skies.

M.C. Childs

M.C. Childs recently served as dean of architecture and planning at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of multiple academic and general audience articles, a newspaper column, and award-winning urban design books including The Zeon Files, Squares, Urban Composition, and the upcoming Foresight and Design (02022). Asimov’s, Analog, Liminality, The New Pacific, Strange Horizons, Typehouse and many other venues have published his poems.