[the Writing of Kuypers] [JanetKuypers.com] [Bio] [Poems] [Prose]
See this YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading 3 poems (“Love Affair With The Moon”, “The View of the Alley” and “fast food makes finger food”) 2/3/14 at Waiting 4 the Bus at Jak’s Tap in Chicago (this video was filmed from a Canon camera; posted on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr). #janetkuypers #janetkuyperspoetry
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See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading the poem Love Affair With The Moon 2/3/14 at Waiting 4 the Bus at Jak’s Tap, Chicago (Canon)
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See YouTube video of Janet Kuypers reading the poem Love Affair With The Moon 2/3/14 at Waiting 4 the Bus at Jak’s Tap, Chicago (posterized)
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Love Affair With The Moonconsider the stars, so small, so unfathomableso beautiful in the night sky how do we understand this love for what we always see in the stars what is always just out of reach? how do we get there? we go to the moon, and try to learn we send rockets to Saturn’s moon Titan to learn what our planet might have been like when this solar system was created we want to learn we want to understand because we are in love I think everyone loves the moon we hear of romance under the moonlight I remember looking at the moon through our telescope when I was 6 years old and historically, scientifically I think everyone was transfixed to their televisions or radios when man first landed on the moon there seemed to be a moment of awe and inspiration, and amazement when there was that one small step for man that one giant leap for mankind scientists have deduced (in trying to guess how this planet got a moon and how necessary it is for our weather patterns) that when the moon was first formed (one theory was that it was formed off a rogue planet they call Orpheus) that the moon was first much, much closer to Earth when it was first formed than it is today that it may have been only 14,000 miles away and not at the current almost 240,000 mile distance it’s at now astronomers now estimate that because of gravity’s change the moon, every year is a mile and a half farther away from the earth If you remember the moon looking so big when you looked at the night sky when you were little, well you may have been right laurie anderson, while studying with NASA as their artist-in-residence learned from scientists at NASA during the cold war and during this country’s desire for nuclear testing they considered setting off nuclear bombs on the dark side of the moon because, you see, no one sees that side of the moon and the radiation would be a safe distance from the Earth when I heard that, I thought: what would setting nuclear explosions on half of the moon do to it’s orbit? what would that do to it’s effect on our weather? and consider the earthquake that caused the tsunami in Asia slowed the rotation of the planet for a second — so would these explosions on the moon affect our rotation, or possibly our orbit? and then I thought: why would anyone, ever want to destroy a heavenly body we so need and don’t know enough about? why would anyone want to destroy something that so many people are so infatuated with that so many people revere? astronomy is like a forbidden love affair something you can never reach but something you can always admire from afar something whose constancy can give you hope even if only when you’re standing outside in the night and looking up at its perennial beauty without ever knowing if you could ever get there 
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