Earth Rise

It was not the moon but the planet Earth that rose that day. It filled my eyes, it made me both an earthling and an alien. I watched the world float over my head; a window of light in a limitless night. Lovely and perfect at this distance. A window to look into but only from the outside. I am a hand and a lens and this star glazed sight a quarter of a million miles away to the day, a sailor between foreign shores. ‘Earth Rise,’ they called it, Life Magazine; 1968 always rising above reason, and my name could be Anders or some other time-displaced alias.