Moon Poem (The New Lucian)

Three men sat in the topmost room
Of a great white tower a mile high:
Their words were slant, their counting wrong,
They spurned the earth and sought the sky.
Their tower's foundation cracked and ruptured,
Blood-red fire and a roar of "kill!"
But falling meant a falling upward
To land on the top of the moon's round hill.
.................I am in love as giants are
.................Who look upon the earth's true star;
.................The restless bee must leave the hive
.................If it desires to thrive.

Two men got where they meant to go:
It took six nights and never a day--
A blank land blacker than waterless snow,
Its air already breathed away,
Its dust ground down by mortar-pestle:
Day and night a fortnight long,
Their only home a pot-shaped vessel,
Their armoured suits and helmets on.
.................I am in love as giants are
.................Who look upon the earth's true star;
.................The wicked bee must leave the hive
.................If it desires to thrive.

They marked the sand with booted feet,
They found the blackness of the night
Indifferent to cold or heat
Insensible to dark or light.
They measured mountains tip to root,
They tilled and sowed the ashen loam,
Tasting the pith of their silver fruit
Beneath the glaucous eye of home.
.................I am in love as giants are
.................Who look upon the earth's true star;
.................The heartless bee must leave the hive
.................If it desires to thrive.

But one man travelled further yet,
Beyond the seas and past the hill
To where the sky is an oubliette
With a straightened view of absolute chill.
He looked down over a barren place
A bootless blank, a crescent uncrossed,
A perfectly cratered and desert waste
Where only breathless moonsand was.
.................I am in love as giants are
.................Who look upon the earth's true star;
.................But a bee with no hive will die alone,
.................However high he has flown.

And looking back in his solitary pass
Behind the unpainted face of the moon
He thought: "were that sand but turned to glass
How mighty a lens could be ground and hewn!
How minute the view it would gift me of
My birthly world of women and men—
I’d magnify the atoms of love
And comprehend spiritual oxygen!"
.................I am in love as giants are
.................Who look upon the earth's true star;
.................But a bee with no hive will die alone,
.................However high he has flown.

Believe unclouded sight is best:
Vacuum’s a medium most unblind.
A man remoter than all the rest,
His homeland deepest and longest behind,
Found his pure lens a cataract white,
His blackface moon stark upside down:
Contentment’s a mode of ballistic flight
That yearns at the apex to fall back down.
.................I am in love as giants are
.................Who look upon the earth's true star;
.................But a bee with no hive will die alone,
.................However high he has flown.