My father is a retired aerospace engineer. When I was a little girl, one of my favorite words was “satellite.” I remember how my father would explain how the moon and yes, satellites, stayed in orbit without falling out of the sky—I also learned that the moon is a natural satellite, although different from the human-made satellites which beamed information to and from earth, or vice versa. So, I always had a curiosity about celestial bodies and both the myths and the science relevant to their existence.
About a year or so before the global pandemic of 2020, China landed a rover on the far side of the moon. The rover’s name was “Jade Rabbit,” a robot that was part of the series of Chang’E missions. This mixture of facts and metaphors inspired me to reflect on our relationships to dead metaphors and their intricate web of mythologies and cultural stories leading to these metaphors—for instance, the moon as green cheese, the man in the moon, the rabbit under a cassia tree in the moon, and the lady who drank the elixir of immortality and floated there.
This poem combined various things I heard about the moon as little girl. It plays on the word, “jade,” in a reference to “jaded hearts” in the penultimate line. Tyler Mills and Brianna Noll selected it for The Account, for which I wrote a short reflection that included the questions, “Why isn’t the dark side of the moon actually dark? Will cotton seeds survive on the moon?” There are scientific answers to these questions, of course—the dark side of the moon isn’t dark; sunlight reaches its lunar surface, but it’s described as dark because it faces away from the earth.
As for the cotton seeds, sadly, they did not survive.
The moon is made of basalt—neither green cheese nor jade. It resembles parts of Iceland where the magma from volcanic activity solidified into igneous rock; a stark, barren, yet beautiful and rugged terrain. Our metaphorical imaginations and mythologies about the moon tell us about our human wishes, fears, and desires as we dwell in a material world, yearning for infinity and a meaningful purpose and coherence to our existence—at times joyful, often chaotic and longsuffering—in the midst of our earthbound finitude: “The darkness is more about not knowing what else is there.” Even in the heart of our unknowing, however, there is God whose love binds us, who is “shooting valentines of love into jaded hearts / where strings hold out atoms of flesh together, for now.”
