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Apollo

By Elizabeth Alexander b. 1962 Elizabeth Alexander

We pull off

to a road shack

in Massachusetts

to watch men walk

on the moon. We did

the same thing

for three two one

blast off, and now

we watch the same men

bounce in and out

of craters. I want

a Coke and a hamburger.

Because the men

are walking on the moon

which is now irrefutably

not green, not cheese,

not a shiny dime floating

in a cold blue,

the way I'd thought,

the road shack people don't

notice we are a black

family not from there,

the way it mostly goes.

This talking through

static, bounces in space-

boots, tethered

to cords is much

stranger, stranger

even than we are.

Elizabeth Alexander, “Apollo” from Poetry (April 1992). Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Source: Poetry (April 1992).

Biography

Elizabeth Alexander was born in Harlem, New York, but grew up in Washington, DC, the daughter of former United States Secretary of the Army and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission chairman, Clifford Alexander Jr. She holds degrees from Yale, Boston University and the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her PhD. Currently the chair of African American Studies at Yale, Alexander is a highly respected teacher and . . .

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