Moonlight and memories

Tales of quieter times

When the street lamps didn’t burn

Their imprints onto the sky

Obscuring the stars

We huddle beneath the endless expanse

Indigo blackness lit by the halo of cities

Above us, pinpricks of brilliant white

Flashing red moving slowly

Marking the trail of passengers

Navigating the great dome of sky

We recall our ancestors

Who set their sails by the stars

Told tales of greatness

Diamond-set forever in the velvet darkness

Who sat in the cavernous moonless nights

Where midnight pooled about their feet

Untouched by neon and halogen

Overwhelmed by uncountable worlds

Hanging above them

I can make out Orion’s Belt, the tail of the Great Bear

Who have doubtless held countless names

And stories in the fullness of time

I can sit in the shadow of Venus

And wonder how much further will my children travel

And their children

Through the ravenous cold of space

To planets so far that the most powerful telescope

Has only caught a glimmer of their suns

Somewhere in that aching vastness

Perhaps someone like me, but so, so different

Stands beneath their own vaulted sky

Under constellations that I would not recognize

For whom Earth is just a gem studding the belt

Of some alien hero

What do they dream of when they see the sky

Lit up under their alien moons

And peer into an infinite galaxy

Infinite possibilities

Ours

For the taking