☀ What Sparks Poetry: “Dear Millennium, a Jade Rabbit on the Far Side of the Moon”

We sent a rover called Jade Rabbit to the far side of our moon,
the other side of hiddenness as it faces away from this world,
where cotton seeds sprouted at first, but don’t expect the moon
to change into fresh cotton fields soon, thanks to airlessness –
minus subzero in microgravity, absolutely freezing up there.
The spacecraft which carried the rover was named for a lady
who drank the elixir of immortality and floated to the moon.
She was the same lady who married the archer who shot nine
of the ten suns scorching the earth. As a little girl, I wondered
if the lady was bored out of her wits from sitting on the moon,
a blanched, cold place without almond cakes or green cheese.
The moon is not made of jade, either. Of course, you can’t eat
jade, but it is soothing to hold. Meanwhile, the moon’s far side
lies in utter darkness due to tidal locking, not what it sounds –
actually the moon’s orbit and its rotation are not about oceans
the way we feel the ebb and flow of their familiar nocturnes.
The darkness is more about not knowing what else is there.
It is also not quite the opposite of what we do see, however.
Don’t expect that the moon will turn into cotton fields soon.
It is not made of mutton fat. Neither cassia trees nor rabbits
dwell there. On the far side, we find what we already know –
that seeds cannot survive in such weather, and sadly, we get
no closer to knowing God in doing so, not even in reaching
out to graze the edges of the farthest stars, dear millennium,
when God is shooting valentines of love into jaded hearts
where strings hold our atoms of flesh together, for now.