Luna

Here I sit next to my dining room window late at night.  The moon in all its fullness is beaming down.  I often think about how this is the same moon, or those stars the same stars, that the Caesars saw when they looked up at night.  Kings and popes, Newton, Nietzsche, Columbus, The Queen of Sheba, the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae and the Persians too, Harriet Tubman on all those nights of leading slaves north, monks gazing out the windows of their monastery walls, the Pharaohs, the laborers who built the pyramids for the pharaohs, the laborers who always seem to be building something on William and Mary’s campus, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, all those heart-broken people in Japan and Libya and all the other devastated places in the world that we’ve temporarily forgotten about because they aren’t prominently featured in the news right now, the President, the Laundromat guy, and the man from the warehouse, and me—we’ve all seen that silver medallion with its familiar somber expression, a sadness and yet a peace.  Under this same moon, some will cry out in agony tonight while others gently sleep.

As different as we all are on this Earth—tomorrow will have its share of strivings and strain, budget battles, tests, performances, competitions, wars, lifting of weights at the gym, trades, and discussions—we all share in the same moon, and we have for eons.