MUSHROOMS ON THE MOON

Mushrooms on the Moon

Mushrooms on the Moon are delicious.
But those who eat them become birds, beasts, or fishes.
Space-fishes, space-beasts, and space-birds.
They stray out into space in shoals and flocks and herds.

At first, rapturous and excited,
But suddenly feeling space all round them and above and below they are affrightened.

Then goggling space-fish go fleeting in formations,
Space beasts go trailing here and there in endless migrations,
Space-birds go hurtling from one end of space to the other in endless agitations
Among the constellations.

But space is too vast, they are lost, as if quite blind.
They are looking for the human bodies they left behind

On the tiny tiny moon, so tiny, tiny as a dust grain

Which they can never hope to alight on again.

Ted Hughes