This poem is called "After the moonwalk."
And it was a poem that I wrote over a number of years
since the first time men landed on the moon.
"When they landed on the moon what we really wanted
was for strange creatures to seize them.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
We wanted them to take off their helmets
and discover they could breathe, that science was wrong
and there was air there.
We wanted people to be there, tiny people
who got that way because they failed to develop usefully
and finally were banished into a universe of rejected
experiments, and insects, perhaps the giant ancestors
of our own ants and bees.
When they took the first step on the moon
we wanted green insect men with mandibles and pincers
to rush out and right on television
drag them off to glass-enclosed cities
or to underground factories and mines
where a humanoid race toils that once
ruled the moon but invented nuclear weapons
and destroyed it and are now the slaves of giant ants
who took over.
And an appeal for funds to build a fleet of airships
to attack the moon and rescue our astronauts in captivity.
Instead what happened was more like the way
we once came to this continent seeing
nothing of value in the lives of the people here
and ruin them and their world, like a renegade cell invading
another, though I want to believe the cancer cell obeys
laws even if they are still beyond our understanding.
Our earth probe succeeded in breaking through the moon's
defenses destroying forever what it was,
but opening a path for settlers, colonies of infection,
the beginning of life.
And if it is not yet a living world in our sense--
though what in the universe is dead, it is all alive--
we have sent the germ cells of our system
to start multiplying there.
Even now our seeds are growing and atmosphere like ours.
If the moon was an egg and the astronauts sperm
germs burrowing in and if we chose
them right for the task, which I doubt, all white and macho
as they are with those degenerate vibrations,
even so it may be the beginning of a new planet.
And when it is ready to be on its own,
to search for its own orbit, what great wrenching away
is ahead for it and us, and dislocations
of the stars, tidal waves, and firestorms on Earth
repeating the destruction of continents
when the moon was born like a baby from our oceans?
What was begun-- and it began long ago,
the necessity for a moon--
must continue to the end, everything always does.
And will go on sitting as long as we can glued to our TV
sets watching it all."