LITTLE MOON HERO
Little Moon Hero, how you learned.
How you flew moon-big through the house
in your little black cape, your bright face
taped on. How you learned, floating through
that dark, to catch and hold the broken light
and cast it forward, to keep your back to the world.
Little Moon Hero, how you learned. How each night
your little hands would swing their little hammer
at bedtime, knocking the bright nail of the sun
into the sea. And how, every waking day, you'd fix
the night back onto your face. Little Moon Hero,
how you learned the years. Your cape and mask
grown too small, how you learned to dream,
your hands pressed hard against the sky, trembling
to stop the orbit, to dream the dust of your dead seas
and valleys still invisible. How you learned to lean
into the light. To disappear. To slip beneath
the daily horizon, going down into adolescence,
down into adulthood, down into the dank shed
of yourself, night after night, sawing and sanding
rails and rungs, to hammer your way back up
to the sky. How you learned the making and unmaking.
How you ground your chalky bones to fit the hole.
Little Moon, how you learned ellipse and turn,
libration and apogee, tipping your axis to still each
wobble, nightly clenching the ripped white hem
of the sea's black blanket over your face. Little
one, little zero. How you wanted to save them all
from falling, to save them from seeing you whole.
Robert Fanning is the author of four full-length collections of poetry, the latest of which is Severance (Salmon Poetry, 2019). His poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Gulf Coast, The Atlanta Review, and many other journals. He is a Professor of English at Central Michigan University, as well as the founder/facilitator of the Wellspring Literary Series in Mt. Pleasant, MI., and the founder/director of PEN/INSULA POETRY, a resource for Michigan poets. For more information, visit: www.robertfanning.wordpress.com.