Listen to the world’s best poetry read out loud.

from: The Man in the Moon

iii. Lunar Passage

Earth carried on in the gaps between the clouds,

blue and green, fabulous with vapours.

How had I lived there? How long

would I be falling?

The lines tensed. The geese rose above me

like a surge of white weather.

It was their season

to vanish into the sky,

and I went with them.

~

Then we were elsewhere. I felt the earth give up.

We moved too fast for breath, but the lines

had gone slack now, the wings stopped.

We were still flying

in a windless brightness that faded

the stars to milk and water.

Motes sparkled round us:

swarms of cuckoos and swallows

on their lunar flight.

~

Looking back I saw the globe where I was born,

smudged with forests, doodled with coastlines.

That flashing sheet of metal

was the Atlantic.

That pear with a bite out of one side,

must be Africa sliding

east as the world turned,

that oval – America,

just as the maps show.

~

We sailed that lukewarm afternoon that had forgotten

how to get dark, beyond rain or snow,

while the world’s engine turned it

twelve times behind us,

and ahead the moon became a place:

the dark patches were country,

furred with trees and grass,

the gold light came from the sun

striking the oceans.