Inspiration can come when you least expect it.  Today, I bring you a poem inspired by Ashley Hansen’s Twitter post:

It’s a pretty fun idea, right?  I couldn’t get it out of my head, and to keep my sanity, those kinds of persistent story ideas usually come out in poems.  (That way I can use them and continue novel-ing.)

Remember when your favorite show
Warned, “Beware of the beast below?”
In our family, little dove,
We warn of the Beast above.

Consume it would, without our fight,
The force that guards our very life.
Then why not slay it? Well you ask:
Without its hunger we’d not last.

Hanging high in lonely night,
‘Tis Moon’s unstated appetite
For gravity that pulls the waves,
And thus it is our lives he saves.

No man within the moon is there.
The Beast alone has fixéd stare,
Ever drinking, lapping up
The force that keeps us grounded, stuck.

For endless does the Earth produce
The gravity Beast must reduce–
Yet, lest you think this Beast a saint,
Know what is our family’s fate:

The Beast, it seems, grows never full
Of eating Earth’s gravitational pull.
Did we not bind him, drive him back,
How soon the earth would be in lack!

With no force left to tether feet,
We’d all float up above the street
And rise up still, through stratosphere,
Till dead from lack of atmosphere.

And why not, then, just slay the Beast?
That would not save us in the least.
Without his endless appetite,
Gravity’s force would not be light.

Up and up the pressure would build
Till we are all smashed flat and killed.
You see, my dove, there is no cure:
The Beast is there and must be, sure.

Precisely there our family comes in
With duty passed down in our kin:
Each month we must put up a fight
When Moon is forged, swollen with light.

With my last breath, to you I say:
Guard Earth for another day.
This title I now give you, love:
Keeper of the Beast Above.