April 2026

This month’s poem feels particularly fitting with the news of NASA’s Artemis II expedition to fly around the moon. Marking a key step towards a long-term return to the moon, this expedition captured the imagination of many across the world. Read on to learn Alexander’s inspiration for writing the poem ‘Moon Landing’ from his brand new collection The Kind Company of Others.

If you were around at the time, you are likely to remember where you were when the first man landed on the moon. I was in Shetland, on the island of Unst, staying with an aunt. She called me through to the drawing room, and we watched, on television, that extraordinary moment, when the images of a cumbersome white boot stepping on the lunar surface marked humanity’s great leap.
There were earlier moments to which it harked back – such as that day in 1953, when the news broke that Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay had conquered Everest. Our memories of such events are called by the psychologist flash-bulb memories. They can remain with us for years, enabling us to picture exactly where we were when we heard the news of the attack on the Twin Towers, or the death of Queen Elizabeth, or the explosion of the Challenger shuttle.
I was in Paris, lining up for a cup of coffee at a meeting when the news came through that the Towers had been attacked. I was in New York, about to speak to a lunchtime meeting of a ladies’ club, the Cosmopolitan Club, when my agent, Robin Straus, came to sit beside me and whispered: “The Queen.” When I heard that Challenger had exploded, I was in a cinema in Edinburgh, waiting for a film to start. A friend in the row behind us leaned forward and said, “The Space Shuttle has exploded.” There used to be things called flash-bulbs, which popped audibly as they ignited and threw everything into stark relief. Now they are no more than a metaphor. And even the life of a metaphor has its stages: a metaphor dies when the image it originally invokes is forgotten. We talk about plumbing the depths, but how many remember the plumb line of old – with its lump of lead – that sailors used to find the depth of the sea. Today we have electronic depth sounders, which, like so much modern technology, are considerably less fun to use – and, of course, more likely to go wrong. An old-fashioned plumb line never needed a manual.

Moon landing
(1969)
There they are, look at the way
The light falls on these white fields
Of uninterrupted powder dust,
That have never before been defiled
By the heralded presence of a major power –
Until now; see the air-conditioned boot,
As delicate, in its way, as any dancer’s,
Descend slowly in its well-rehearsed tread;
Nobody asked them to arrive; they are here
As we have been everywhere, time after time,
Uninvited, but full of good intentions.

Alexander’s brand new poetry collection The Kind Company of Others is available from Polygon now.