Ubuntu
A translation into Tibetan
Soften… dissolve… let the wave cap
of ego slip with a sigh back
into the ocean of common awareness,
touching the world with such vivid
humility, gently fashioning a cradle
of compassion: see there the world-child
gaze back with your own eyes, see
your true self in the pain and joy
of other lives, of a larger nature
that births us all. Patiently await
the miracle: to see; touch and taste
and listen too, but above all,
allow yourself to see with newly
opened vision that “I am”
because we are

Magnificent Desolation
Those far-voyagers,
eclipsing the world that birthed them, trusting
the motor on their tail to catch them
and latch them into the Moon’s tawny influence,
turned the almost-last corner in the maze
of mission milestones leading from the July-hot
and thrust-blasted Kennedy pad
to this final staging post
for the descent to the surface
and into history.
Now, as they’d decided
some weeks earlier, they’d view
the real mission as finally underway.
A ballet of burns, hard-wired software
trajectories and commit points brought Eagle
not to the preplanned landing site but long
and over a boulder field. Nothing for it
but to take the stick, full manual,
helicoptering close across the aeon-tumbled ground
for a better spot. Houston keeping schtum –
out of their hands – as the last seconds
of fuel slip by; then “Contact light,”
a breathless pause, and “Tranquility base:
the Eagle has landed.” “Roger tranquility,”
Cap com comes back, picking up the novel
other-worldly call sign,
“we copy you on the ground.” Sometimes tech-talk
becomes purest poetry; no lyric stylist
could replicate it.
Soon
and cunningly timed for prime-time
the first and second man would emerge,
stand on a lonely little world,
and wonder. They bunny-hopped
efficiently about, a few pounds of likely-
looking rocks selected, a couple of experiments
set up, Armstrong venturing over
to the tiny crater they’d set down beside,
his walk-back limit less than a stone’s throw
to their faithful lander.
Back inside,
they photographed each other’s tired, triumphant grins,
then left that place for ever. The whole trip had been
a surreal kaleidoscope of phases:
not like the Moon’s phases,
flowing seamlessly into one another as poets
through the centuries have noted, but grotesquely
disjoint: the bat-out-of-hell thunder-climb
to Earth orbit; then the time-suspended
translunar coast, the stack turning leisurely
as if on a spit, the Sun’s fierce-heating glare
evenly spread; the dream dance of manoeuvres
to kiss the Moon for one lingering summer instant;
homeward-bound through re-rendezvous and brisker
return coast; and last, the meteoric
ride down from interplanetary speed
to gently parachuted plop into the welcoming
warmth of the Pacific.
Except, then, an epilogue endured
of decontamination suits, quarantine facilities –
the three heroes crowding the trailer window
for awkward words exchanged via prison-visit-style
phone handsets with an insincere
and unsupportive new President – and finally
the ticker-tape motorcades and world touring
beginning the long slow fade from fame’s hysteria
into old newspaper front pages and science
picture books for kids.
As for their legacy: just flags
and footprints? The likely origin-story
of our outsized satellite accidentally
discovered through well-chosen moonrocks?
Or, as the decades start to turn
into centuries, will future perspectives open
onto a Columbus moment? No earlier inhabitants
to kill off this time, but a barrier
brought down: the Moon, Mars, Titan and Galileans
not end goals but stepping stones
into the endless dark from which new worlds,
children to other stars, worlds unimaginable
in ’69, shyly emerge: debutantes
at a galactic ball that’s far
more magnificent than we ever guessed
and far from desolate.