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By 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: The Poetry Anthology, 1912-2002 (Poetry magazine, 2002)

  • Activities
  • Nature
  • Social Commentaries

Poet Bio

Elizabeth Alexander
Born in Harlem, Elizabeth Alexander was educated at Yale, Boston University, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she took her doctorate. She has been on the faculties at Haverford College, the University of Chicago, Smith, and is the former chair of the African American Studies Department at Yale. Her first book, The Venus Hottentot, includes a tour de force monologue, spoken by Sara Baartman who was taken from South Africa and exhibited before European audiences as anatomical oddity. Other poems use a variety of voices, including the boxer Muhammad Ali, to address race, gender, and cultural divisions. In 2009 she read one of her poems at President Obama's inauguration. See More By This Poet

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