MOONDUST GRAY

The moon is not white.

White is what distance says when it refuses to inspect the surface.

Up close, the moon is gray.

Basalt dust. Impact glass. Pulverized stone.

A world struck so often that damage became texture.

No rain erased it. No wind softened it. No green thing arrived to make the scars look useful.

Every crater stayed.

Every footprint stayed.

Every collision kept its evidence and still became ordinary ground.

This is GRAY.

Not absence.

Not purity.

Not darkness.

The record after the record has become surface.

Lit by another body’s fire. Surrounded by black space. Belonging fully to neither.

Almost white. Almost black.

Never revelation.

The moon is adored from far away.

Up close, it is dust with a history of impacts

and no permission to be dramatic.

GRAY understands.

Something happened here.

Many things happened here.

But the color remained matte, mute, plain.

That is the cruelty:

not that nothing occurred,

but that everything did—

and the universe still called it gray.