Robert Maddox-Harle writes

Footprints

Scaling the crumbling cliff of destiny

I turn and let my eye fall

down down to the valley floor;

footprints disappear

filling with the dust of barrenness,

echoed unmistakenly

in shades of strictures far too harsh;

every advance eroded,

every move to imprint upon the path

a permanence,

is swept away unnoticed.

Reflecting, resting on a ledge,

the hardness of my granite loft

belies enduring limitations,

decaying basalt strewn across

a face of life intimidates mortality

and the fault line of life and death

narrows to a slit,

a fractured folding.

Higher now the valley fading

obscured by veils of mist;

temptation to dissolve into the misting

lessens with each weathered rock,

and mellowness betrays the ageing.

But all too soon I'll reach out gladly

to touch the rising moon.

 

 Neil Armstrong's footprint on the moon, 20 July 1969