So, one day, my father gave me the Moon.
It cracked and broke.
It fell from a bookshelf with too many books,
Or perhaps I was careless with it, or clumsy like I get when I’m about to have my period,
Or a wind knocked it down,
Or it was tired of being stuck in orbit without any friends closer than Brooklyn.
Anyway, it broke into two terrible pieces,
And I cried
Because it was the Moon, and my father gave it to me, and I broke it.
And one feels great guilt in the destruction of celestial bodies—
Even if you are only one small body stuck in a relentless system of waste, still it is all your fault, all the time, and life isn’t long enough to first learn this and then make all the necessary reparations.
Well, to continue my story, I broke the Moon and cried, and my husband Carlos cannot stand to see me cry.
Filled with the carnival glee of desperation, he turned cartwheels, wore a red nose and rainbow wig, did handstands, conjured silk handkerchiefs from his sleeve, showered me in flowers and confetti, threatened to eat his own nads, whatever he had to do to keep me from weeping.
But I was inconsolable; I had broken the Moon.
Nothing would ever be right, and, you see, my father, my father had given it to me.
So Carlos, who is clever and loving, went online—
And with the frictionless ease of technology, with a pulse of electricity, with kindness and fossil fuels, and corporate machinery, with all the history of knackerhouses and patents and plastic packaging, and workers strikes and rare materials mined from the earth, and strange planetary systems behind him,
He bought me some gorilla glue
So I could fix my Moon.
So I could plug it into my computer, and charge it up
And watch it glow, and think of my father
On all those nights in this brick-lined city
When I cannot see the Moon.
C.S.E. Cooney 
Oh my darling. I love this so much.
Your moon now has history, a healed scar, a seam to sprout legends from.
Do you know about this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splitting_of_the_Moon
I once wrote a poem for my aunt following some film from the 90s in which tender teenagers woo each other and one of the wooing elements is about the moon having been broken and the girl wrote a poem about it called “Broken Moon” so I, too, wrote a poem of that title or similar, that I only remember a couple of lines from (“Did you know the moon was broken? It happened a very long time ago”) but cannot quickly find.
I am so glad for your supergluing gorilla love, your sweet sutured sphere, your unrelenting glow!
SILVER! I did NOT know about the splitting of the Moon, or that I’m (however peripherally) taking part of a longer poetic tradition. Some of the “end days” ideas were in me while writing this, because of a book I’ve just been narrating about the state of the world (and keeping of hope and activism while facing it), so this is especially pleasing.
If you DO find that poem for your auntie, I would love to read it!!!
Oh goodness, the range of emotions I followed you through here, ending with tears pricking at the corners; what joy and love and light. Thank you for sharing it!
Thank you so kindly for reading! I was myself moved by such a small, ordinary act to sit and write a poem about it—which itself seems miraculous.
So lovely
Thank you! I rather loved writing it.