This Rock, That Rock

Book excerpt: To celebrate 50 years since the first moon landing by Apollo 11 in 1969, here is an original collection of 50 poems. In his poems Dom tells us of two incredible things--the Moon is incredible: it controls our tides, to give us 24-hour days, and it keeps our planet stable enough to have seasons. Dom reminds us that poetry too is incredible because it is the most flexible form of expressing ourselves and has been always how we used to tell stories, particularly about our ways of seeing this incredible Moon. The Moon is an inspiring rock of possibilities. To tell us this, Dom uses lots of poetry forms: short poems and long ones, silly ones and serious ones. There are haiku and sonnets, acrostics and shapes. He uses kennings and metaphors and slang. He uses established rhythms which you might find in older poems and he uses the rhythms he hears in his head when his son smiles at him. So take up the challenge: Read the poems, fly to the moon, land on it, orbit it. Go to walk on it, live on it, steal it, eat it!