The Moon in Broad Daylight

The connection between me and all that stuff
out there beyond the moon and even the sun
hasn’t been made absolutely clear by anyone
even when the speaker delivers ex cathedra
with firmness and threats of excommunication
the news that God is in his heaven and all’s
right with the world, the true world, the world
that began they say six thousand years ago,
give or take a couple of decades depending on
the calculation and who’s doing the counting.


I can’t ignore reason and especially the Hubble
telescope sending back to our modest planet
pictures of dying stars and shimmering nebulae,
pictures of things that don’t even exist any more,
a picture of the Big Bang itself being a possibility,
giving us, I guess, a look at ∞ or whatever comes
closest to the far edge of infinity, but that’s beside
the point of this writing which I began just to say
how absolutely wonderful it was to see the moon
this morning in the part of the universe where I live.

(I took the picture above this morning around 6:30 with a 250 mm lens on a Nikon D2X. Later in the morning, around 11 o'clock, I noticed the moon still visible below a thin cloud. This time I used the Nikon D100 with a 200 mm lens.)IMAGES FROM THE HUBBLE TELESCOPE