Hymn to Apollo: A Homeric Hymn for the Twenty-First Century (and Beyond) by Michael Ceraolo
Of you the bard sings first and last:
from Florida you started out,
the latest in a line launched at such speed
so as to break the bounds of Earth's hold upon us,
and how a few days later you came to land,
manned,
on what had been til then the gods' abode
Fifty years later I still remember you, Apollo, shot afar
I don't know if I was sitting down when you landed
in what was mid-afternoon in my place on Earth,
but rather than leap from my seat seven-and-a-half hours later
when your crew of two started to step down,
I sat transfixed by history and poetry
on that Sunday evening
"Now let the Earth know this, and also broad Heaven above":
for three days and three nights we had taken in your perspective
and most would remember it forevermore,
though of course some would soon forget the moment,
or worse, pretend they hadn't seen such a thing:
that ours was a blue planet with few natural borders
Yet a symbol of nationalism was planted by you,
and so soon after and going forward to today
were the rumors spread that you were a hoax:
one that the thousands involved in you
somehow conspired to perpetrate on the world,
and even beyond that,
somehow managed to keep secret this half-century
And so there are those who didn't believe your report,
though they have not disdained your discoveries
There are several shrines around the country
who honor you, though none who honor you exclusively,
and so I will not cease to hymn you from afar,
both in time and in miles,
and will hold you up as the kind of project
that we desperately need today,
but that we are unlikely to have
Michael Ceraolo is a 62-year-old retired firefighter/paramedic and active poet who has had two full-length books (Euclid Creek, from Deep Cleveland Press; 500 Cleveland Haiku, from Writing Knights Press) and several shorter-length books published, and has two more full-length books in the publication pipeline: Euclid Creek Book Two, from unbound content press, and Lawyers, Guns, and Money, from Writing Knights Press.