– July 20, 1969, the Apollo 11 moon landing as seen
from Girl Scout camp on the Kitsap Peninsula, WA.
Untethered from our mothers and fathers,
we lay on our backs fanning around the campfire,
embers still glowing like heart fragments.
Above, the moon. On a clear night, far away
from city lights—she was a bride attended
by a million stars.
Our counselors with names
like Birdsong, Brown Bear and Buttercup
had strung extension cords from the Lodge
past the flag pole and out into the woods
to the portable tv now propped up on a stump.
Static, a voice jumping. The rabbit ears adjusted
toward the moon. And then, the fuzz of astronaut,
a man walking on the moon.
Right above us.
The tv glowed like embers, like I imagined
a heart up close, or the earth from a distant moon,
burning quietly in the dark wooded night.
________
Heidi Seaborn is the author the award-winning debut book of poetry Give a Girl Chaos {see what she can do} (C&R Press/Mastodon Books, 2019). She’s been published by numerous journals such as The Missouri Review, Mississippi Review and Penn Review.
