Moon dream
I dreamt there on the dark side of the moon
I with my mind, body and soul isolated from
All humanity figured out the answer to
the
Question I’d posed my entire life, as if only
There on the dark side of the moon where
Shadows are their coldest and loneliest could
I fully understand the power of arriving
at
Conclusions without the slightest distractions,
The minutest sounds -- a bird crying in
the
Distance, a breathy yawn induced by
capitalistic
Strain, elbow joints popping pleasurably
while
Stretching after a nap, wiping off steam
from
A mirror revealing a two-toned face, a
lover’s pen
Scratching the start of a poem on an old
Phone bill -- and then the greatest joy -- lifting
off
The cratered surface of the dark side of the
moon,
Head facing the Alpha Centauri system, body
Suspended in zero gravity, slave to no
gravity,
Obliged at last to no one thing, nothing, no
one, me.
Moonbase Overlook -- Jim Scott
At 4.37 light years from the sun, Alpha Centauri is our solar system's closest star system (and closest planetary system). It is a triple star system, consisting of Rigil Kentaurus, Toliman (both of which are sun-like Class G and K stars that form a binary star that orbit around a common center), and Proxima Centauri (a Class M red dwarf). Regarded as a single star, it is the 3-rd brightest in the night sky (with an apparent magnitude of -0.27), it is part of the constellation Centaurus, known to the Babylonians as Bison-man. In his calendrical poem "Fasti" (The Festivals) Publius Ovidus Naso claimed it honored the wise centaur Chiron ("hand"), the son of Kronos (the titan Time), who transformed himself into a stallion in order to impregnate Philyra (linen tree), one of the 3,000 Oceanids (the daughters of his brother Ouranos (the titan Sky), hence his 1/2 human / 1/2 horse appearance; raised by Apollo, he was the inventor of botany and pharmacy but was unable to heal himself after accidentally being wounded by Herakles' poison arrows;his 1/2 brother Zeus placed him among the stars. Jean Richaud recognized its binary nature in 1689, the 2nd binary star to be identified, and Manuel john Johnson deduced its parallax in 1832, making it the 2nd star to have its distance measured. Proxima Centauri was not discovered until 1915, by Robert Thorburn Ayton Innes; in 2016 Guillem Anglada-Escudé of Queen Mary University of London and a 30-person team from the European Southern Observatory confirmed the existence of Proxima Centauri b, Earth's closest planet.
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