"Before Apollo"
"Praise to my big brother who, while nursing
his hidden wounds, turned a refrigerator box
into a rocket ship.
Praise his kind heart and quick mind, his meticulous design
of the windows, the control knobs, the dashboard,
the gadgets he had no words for but will surely
need it to survive with no gravity, no air.
Praise him for spending days in our garage
gazing into the long hot summer and making
this contraption with his bare hands and naked soul,
for not giving up.
Praise him for not giving up.
My brother, who could have hidden in his room
or used his hands as fists, who could have
scaled the walls of our prison and escaped but instead built
a spaceship and asked me inside, his bratty little sister,
and turned on that magic-fueled engine with one twist of a knob
and yelled, blast off, not caring
who heard the triumph in his voice
or who saw the flames in his eyes,
and shot us up and away from that harsh patch of Earth
with its cruel truth and no one to tell them to,
all the way up to the shining face of the moon."