The Decency Of Becoming Beautiful

The moon has bruises.

We call them craters

because nobody remembers

when any of it happened.

In the kitchen,

we have better names

for other kinds of damage.

A tomato is cut open and called preparation.

A fish is gutted and called dinner.

An onion is peeled until it cries,

and nobody asks what happened to it.

The body is less forgiving.

Strike it once and it keeps the evidence.

Red.

Then purple.

Then yellow.

A bruise is inconvenient

because it refuses to become history quickly.

So we cover it.

The moon had billions of years.

Time did to its wounds what time does best;

it made them acceptable.

And the idiocy of intellect called them beautifully flawed.

Now we put photographs of its scars on walls.

We write love poems about them.

We call the whole thing romantic.

Perhaps that is all beauty is:

damage

that has survived long enough

for us to forget it was damage.

A crater instead of a wound.

Dinner instead of a dead thing.

A sunset instead of a burning sky.

And a bruise,  still a bruise, 

because 

some wounds haven't had the decency to become beautiful yet.