Moon Break

Students always bomb the church,
Says a teacher, explaining
To another teacher how

To conduct a classroom thought
Experiment in morals—
Save a church full of priceless

Ancient artworks, or a bus
Full of people? Bomb the church.
And yet, people bomb people,

And a recent novelist
Argued that’s all that matters,
What people do to people,

And he was sick of poets
Who write poems about the moon.
Imagine if that moon broke.

Bigger events do happen.
Planetoids aren’t immortals.
More often, bombing the church

Destroys both art and people.
The past two nights, the waning
Local perspective has seen

The moon backing, dark side first,
Its way over the sharp cliffs,
A faint, pearl and silver sphere,

An empty bubble of dark
Outlined against darker night,
Followed by the stab of light.