The Moon's Full Gaze

 As the Artemis II astronauts completed their loop around the moon this weekend, the news reports were full of descriptions of the sheer awe and wonder the lunar travelers experienced as they beheld the Earth's natural satellite up close. 

One astronaut, in her amazement, even coined a new term for the feeling, which quickly went viral: "moon joy." 

I am reminded of John Keats's words, from Endymion—during that stretch of the nineteenth century when the Romantic poets had all started worshiping the moon as a pagan goddess. 

What is there in thee, Moon! that thou shouldst move

My heart so potently? When yet a child

I oft have dried my tears when thou hast smiled.

Thou seem'dst my sister: hand in hand we went

From eve to morn across the firmament. 

But all at once—my mind is brought back to Earth. 

My "moon joy" evaporates as I remember that all the rest of the news cycle today has been full of the U.S. president's genocidal threats against the people of Iran—saying he wants to blot out their "whole civilization." 

And then, of a sudden, the Moon's face does not seem so joyful. Instead, it seems full of reproach—like the moon in Thomas Hardy's poem:

I looked up from my writing,

   And gave a start to see,

As if rapt in my inditing,

   The moon's full gaze on me.

The poet demands to know why the Moon looks at him with such side-eye. She replies:

'Oh, I've been scanning pond and hole

   And waterway hereabout

For the body of one with a sunken soul

   Who has put his life-light out. [...]

'Did you hear his frenzied tattle?

   It was sorrow for his son

Who is slain in brutish battle,

   Though he has injured none.

Likewise, how many have been "slain in brutish battle" already in Trump's needless war of aggression in Iran? 

How many other American soldiers, Iranian civilians and children, people throughout the region, have perished in this war's first month—and how many more will perish before it's over?

 And must they fall—the young, the proud, the brave—

   To swell one bloated chief's unwholesome reign? 

—as Byron rightly asked about Napoleon. 

What would the Moon say to us, in such circumstances, could she talk? Would it be merely to spread joy? Or would it not be a message of dismay at what we have made of our neighboring world? 

Would it not be something more like what the Moon says in Hardy's poem: "I am curious to look / Into the blinkered mind / Of one who wants to write a book / In a world of such a kind"?

Which is really saying the same thing as Brecht's classic line: "A talk about trees seems almost a crime / Because it implies silence about so many horrors." 

A talk about moons too.