Abora

Studying Shrapnel

8/24/17 2:15 PM

\"I Miss My Baby\" -Funkadelic, 1972

 

In America, we bomb the moon

No, really

On the same day they gave Obama the Peace Prize

They blew up part of the moon

To study the wreckage

They took samples of the destruction

To understand the whole

 

What do the moon men think?

Foreign countries attacking their footing

Destroying to better know what it is made of

Do the lunar settlers see why we are doing this?

Or do they see impersonal fusillades

Violent strikes from thousands of miles away

By a bored computer tech

 

In America, we fly metal vultures everywhere

Over desert hills and contested waters

Bombing desert grey scopes and hoping the land turns up tolerance

Scorching swaths of what becomes lunar emptiness

Right here on earth

 

NASA used to send golden records into the cosmos

Grooved with whale noises and ancient string music

Great minds created an intergalactic toaster

With 8 track players and impossibly long radio tethers

Something lasting, a spacecraft made to be ancient

And now?

We bomb whatever lunar desert we can find