Poem: So can you
The Moon still exists dear,
Earth’s still blue as rivers cry
while the avians still fly.
Not a single day goes by
when they don’t try, so can you.
Notes: This poem was written for the Global Poetry Writing Month. The Day 1 prompt encouraged posting in the Japanese poetry form of tanka. The poem reflects on the overlapping feelings around existing, weeping, and flying that many of us feel these days amid war and claims of technological utopia. Even as NASA has finally launched astronauts towards the Moon for the first time in over five decades, its juxtaposition with the ongoing US and Israeli military strikes killing and displacing children in Iran and the Middle East does not reinforce the slogan of “going to the Moon for all humanity”. I know many of us would’ve been way more excited about Artemis II if it also didn’t overlap with a million children weeping. If this was any other space power, the media would not have hesitated to contrast the double standards.
