A poem about the moon

Selected poems

How Hard It Is to Be the Moon

How hard it is to be the moon.
I hang palely in the sky,
while all else shines and sparkles
and the shooting stars go by.

And on Earth, the useless poets
scribble words in praise of me
for recital by young lovers,
gazing moonstruck at the sea.

For a time I had some company
but then the visits stopped.
Magnificent desolation
is carved deep into my rock.

The tides sweep in and out once more.
That’s the way things always are.
The Earth goes about its business.
I float alone, among the stars.

Her Universe

Assorted Poems, Selected poems

She gazed up into the night sky
with intensity
and pondered the immensity
of the observable universe.

Space seemed so spacious,
forty-six billion light years in radius,
with recent astronomical analyses
suggesting one hundred billion galaxies
and stars numbering
three hundred sextillion
(give or take a few thousand billion).

Even if she set off soon,
a walk to the moon
would take three thousand days
which, to coin a phrase,
would be sheer lunacy.

The universe held her spellbound
in its unimaginable boundlessness
until the phone rang
and she went back inside
her cramped one-bedroom flat in Croydon
to answer it.