The Lovesong of the Selenologist

(ASIDE: This isn’t exactly a “Dear Science” love letter, but it’s in the same spirit.  I’m a planetary scientist who uses radar to study the Earth’s moon.  I wrote this poem at a conference in France.)

My darling moon

    do we forget how we love each other?

Here in the stacks of yellowed paper,

   the collated corpses 

   of past affairs,

   entombed in grey

   magnetic data tape

   like dust on bowing shelves:

   How cluttered we are; how vast.

Do we forget our long nights of conversation

   shouting coded messages, waiting

   for dampened echoes in reply?

Yes, we forget;

   we’re impatient:

   You grow weary of my impulsiveness.

   I delude myself you’ll change.

But I see you, wanton,

   over foreign streets

   on your back or your side,

   suggestively,

   and I know that you’ll follow,

   all my short-lived days:

Be promiscuous, love, when I’ve gone.

- K. S. Martin-Wells (aka Amelie Andrezel)