Not Worth the Trip
April 9 2026
The far side of the moon isn’t dark,
there is no “dark side”.
Is this a misunderstanding
or could it be metaphor?
After all, might as well be dark
since it’s kept from our eyes.
But knowing my fellow man
I suspect hubris;
that the universe
must be how it’s seen through human eyes,
and what we can’t see
no one can.
Perhaps doesn’t even exist;
as if we were infants
who have yet to learn object permanence,
baffled
when someone vanishes
behind the couch.
But now, we have photographic evidence
and it’s what you’d expect,
a bleak lunar landscape
resembling pumice stone;
fine regolith
bombarded by meteors,
and a horizon line
that sharply divides light from dark.
Where a single step
would take your blood
from vaporized to ice.
Not worth the trip, I’d say.
But then, your eyes fix
on the crescent of earth peeking over its edge,
suspended
in the vacuum of space
like a blue and green jewel on its black velvet bed;
the rarest gem
in a forbidding universe.
How we never see ourselves, but should.
A living planet
smaller and more fragile
than we ever imagined from here;
spaceship earth
on its journey through the cosmos.
Where we breath the same air
and depend on its life support.
Where we are all astronauts,
taking for granted
our only home.
This photo was taken from Artemis II as it looped around the far side of the moon; our first return to deep space in half a century (excluding unmanned probes), and far enough away to see the entire earth as a sphere.
Scientists always knew the far side wasn’t dark, but the misnomer persists. Inaccurate, but a decent metaphor for something we can’t see anyway. Or hubris: if it’s dark to us, then it must be objectively dark, dark to anyone anywhere.
In finally opening our eyes to the far side, we ended up opening our eyes to ourselves.
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