“Lunar Landing, 1966” by Laboni Islam

October 14, 2024

Poetry Pause is the League of Canadian Poets’ daily poetry dispatch. Read “Lunar Landing, 1966” by Laboni Islam. Due to its formatting, this poem is only available as an image.

Lunar Landing, 1966

By Laboni Islam

[East Pakistan] Ablutions done, five children flung rugs onto the floor. Ten knees pressed craters into velvet pile, plush like the humid day descending. The Moon was rising in another room, where my grandfather turned the dial on a new-fangled television. He wore his hair parted like his country, strands falling to one side or another according to inclination and where the comb went through. Dragging their dusty tails, five children came like comets, stood blinking like stars. My mother’s memories are bright crescents, waxing and waning, orbiting a centre that’s spinning on its axis. Would her father have been alive? A probe had landed, star-spangled on the Moon, softly in the Ocean of Storms. For hours, it transmitted slow, grey pictures from space: The rocks. The footpad. The tripod’s shadow. People applauded aluminum tubing, as an antenna with a bug’s sensitivity tossed data across the 400,000–kilometre synaptic gap to Earth. Signals received, broadcast. My mother tucks a silver hair behind her ear. She says they should have been teenagers when the spacecraft landed, that it was star-spangled (not the hammer, the sickle, and the star). If children, then no television, but the television was there, the Moon in it, and her father’s face, full but vanishing through phases. I have seen the same side of her my whole life, the side with the Storms astronomers say may be scars from her early history, a cataclysmic impact. My mother assembles frames into a horizon called father. The Moon reflects the light of four sons. One daughter.

Copyright © Laboni Islam

Previously published at cbcbooks.ca (2017) and in Light Years (Baseline Press 2022). First appeared in Poetry Pause on March 31, 2020.

Laboni Islam was born in Canada to Bangladeshi parents. Her poem “Lunar Landing, 1966” was shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize (2017). She is the author of the chapbooks Light Years (Baseline Press, 2022) and Trimming the Wick (ignitionpress, 2023).

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