The Wounded Moon

I've been troubled for years by the final lines in Australian poet Rosemary Dobson's poem Child of Our Time:

I see the wounded moon, I fear
The travelling star, the mushroom cloud,
Beneath the perilous universe
For you, for you, my head is bowed.

... why is the moon wounded? This has to be a reference to the Apollo moon landings, but aren't those something, well -- gather up all of your profound feelings about the great adventure -- holy?

It was only today, reading about the Navajo objections to human remains being deposited on the moon last year, that I got an idea of what Dobson might have had in mind. Buu Nygren, President of the Navajo nation:

"We view it as a part of our spiritual heritage, an object of reverence and respect. The act of depositing human remains and other materials, which could be perceived as discards in any other location, on the moon is tantamount to desecration of this sacred space."

There's garbage on the moon! Bits of spaceship and equipment -- golf balls -- literal bags of shit, piss, and vomit! To me, something like the left-behind lander or the bootprint has an overwhelmingly positive meaning -- but I can easily see how from someone else's perspective it might look like the sacred moon was used as a dump. Hell, I'm a Pagan, I can see that from my own perspective. It's a grinding of gears.

I don't know whether this is the angle from which Dobson was coming. Other lines in the poem suggest she wasn't anti-space exploration. She may have had in mind the potential exploitation of space as an arena for war. If we can put people onto the moon, what else can we put in space -- spy satellites, beams, bombs? This, too, is a grinding of gears for someone who became a space enthusiast last year, and amongst the science and the joy discovered the pollution, the exploitation, the grifting, the moral compromises. The beautiful Space Shuttle didn't just do science, it also worked for the Department of Defense.

Dobson places "the travelling star" -- a natural catastrophe that comes from outside, perhaps an asteroid hitting the Earth -- into the same category as the human-made mushroom cloud, a threat from the inside. Discarding the Outer Space Treaty and putting weaponry into orbit will put the human race into the same category as the travelling star. We will be pointing two guns at our own head in an already dangerous universe.

Edit: See also: Humans will soon be able to mine on the moon—but should we?