If you are a national newspaper and you are covering an event of such import that your choice of words, what is said and what is seen, is critically important, what are you likely to do? In the case of the New York Times and the day that Man landed on the Moon, the 21st July, 1969, they decided to employ a poet to express in verse what prose could not do. So, they turned to Archibald MacLeish, veteran poet, Pulitzer Prize winner and all round polymath, to find the words that would express the solemn and unprecedented nature of the event.

MacLeish had been previously engaged by the NYT when Apollo 8 had successfully entered lunar orbit. On that occasion he had indeed used prose, a heightened, erudite and resonant prose.

"To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold — brothers who know now they are truly brothers."

You can quibble with the masculine pronoun now, but it was the norm, then. Aside from the extraordinary Poppy Northcutt, who was working as an engineer for technical staff on that mission, it was very much a white male world. That doesn't lessen the achievement a whit, and much has changed nowadays for the better. But I digress.

Macleish actually penned a poem for the Times for the Apollo 11 landing and it appeared on the front page of the NYT. Here it is.


Voyage To The Moon.


Presence among us,
wanderer in the skies,

dazzle of silver in our leaves and on our
waters silver,

O

silver evasion in our farthest thought–
“the visiting moon” . . . “the glimpses of the moon” . . .

and we have touched you!

From the first of time,
before the first of time, before the
first men tasted time, we thought of you.
You were a wonder to us, unattainable,
a longing past the reach of longing,
a light beyond our light, our lives–perhaps
a meaning to us…

Now

our hands have touched you in your depth of night.

Three days and three nights we journeyed,
steered by farthest stars, climbed outward,
crossed the invisible tide-rip where the floating dust
falls one way or the other in the void between,
followed that other down, encountered
cold, faced death–unfathomable emptiness . . .

Then, the fourth day evening, we descended,
made fast, set foot at dawn upon your beaches,
sifted between our fingers your cold sand.

We stand here in the dusk, the cold, the silence . . .

and here, as at the first of time, we lift our heads.
Over us, more beautiful than the moon, a
moon, a wonder to us, unattainable,
a longing past the reach of longing,
a light beyond our light, our lives–perhaps
a meaning to us . . .

O, a meaning!

over us on these silent beaches the bright earth,

presence among us.




Finally, on this day when this writer reflects upon the significance of something that happened five decades ago, and who feels as inspired as ever, I reprint the classic photo of Buzz Aldrin, on the lunar surface. What brave men these!