PERSPECTIVE, PROXIMITY, AND POTENTIAL: On Writing “Infrared”

One my favorite poems that invokes the moon–among pieces such as Robert Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night” or Jean Toomer’s “Beehive”–is Gil Scott-Heron’s poem “Whitey on the Moon.” The poem, which is built upon that eponymous epistrophe, situating “whitey on the moon” as a refrain at the end of many of the poem’s sentences, lays out a litany of hardships–food and housing insecurity, medical debt, drug addiction, taxation–juxtaposed against the reality a national investment in space travel. As is often said, budgets are documents that reflect our values. For Gil Scott-Heron, the plight of urban (and rural) blk people in America was especially damning when contrasted with the money and resources the country was willing to spend to launch and land white men on a moon 238,000 miles away. And, obviously I would say, the plea of the poem is not that we do not invest in exploration beyond Earth but rather that we see care on Earth and exploration in space as equally worthy and not in competition. We can, and should, attend to both. And we are capable of doing so.

When I began drafting “Infared,” the poem I am fortunate enough to have included in the Moonbound Project, I began by watching a video offered by NASA which used new supercomputer imagining to offer insight on how the moon came to be formed. Thus my process began with government-funded science, free and available to all. And the information I gleaned from the video, I began to weave it into the premise for my piece–that being, what would the Moon say to the Earth as humanity approaches the cusp of being a multiplanetary species? The fact that the Moon was once a piece of the Earth, to me, only affirms the connection between our current lives here and our possibility up there.

The distance and thermal difference between the Earth and Moon being so significant, I wanted to use a direct address–Moon speaking to Earth–to create greater intimacy and to advance the idea that while we’ve seen the Moon every day for millennia, do we really know it? I’ve always believed, though means do not avail themselves to all, that travel is crucial to humanity. Our ultimate understanding of ourselves will likely not come from cloistering. And, yes, travel also brings conflict and conquest, but luckily (as far as we know … ), there are no others to encounter on the Moon. So, tonally, I approached the piece from a place of familial longing–the Earth and Moon, siblings created by the collision with a mother-body.

Every persona poem is a lie. No writer has any idea how someone else or some anthropomorphized entity would speak. Behind the mask of language, the persona is the poet. For this piece, I imagine that behind the voice is the wonder of myself as an only child. I can only imagine the excitement of finally having the opportunity to sit down with, play and laugh with, kin that have only ever grazed your life. That excitement, and the anticipation all you can do together.