Woman On The Moon
Words by: Tim and Frances Tompkins | Music by: Tim.
Lyrics:
As I walk the old poet’s moon,
ancient stardust I kick up
drops like a stone balloon.
But I am light and unconfined
after days in the flight. Here’s a [little*] leap
for all of womankind.
The sky is starry black the whole lunar-long day,
but for the blazing of the harsh sun.
No air, ozone or weather to stand in the way,
just my designer spacesuit blocking the radiation.
Though I’m ten earth circumferences out in the heavens
and my own planet beckons like a big blue and white moon,
my passion is the mission my team has been given,
adventure and [in**] science,
we’ll go home and start our long debriefings all too soon.
And I wonder if you’re gazing from the windy dune, my love,
where we watched an eclipse and you kissed
your woman on the moon.
Woman on the moon.
[* muting “little” gives more rhythmic kick to “leap”]
[** “in” is better than “and”]
Inception:
The original lyric in 1979 was a beautiful and serene poem by co-worker, Pam Nelson, in Santa Cruz, California. She wrote about standing on the shore at night looking up at the moon. I was exploring jazz chords on guitar at the time, and her easy meter and structure were the basis for a quick song rendition that delighted me for more than a decade. But eventually I grew tired of the “I am here and this is how I feel” statement; I hungered for more woman and more moon. It took a leap into space equivalent to 10 trips around the earth to put the woman, not on the beach gazing at the moon, but on the moon gazing back to earth. And it took Frances’s special talent to suggest a romantic heart-line that attracts like gravity and warms like the sun across the reaches of cold space. [Tim]
Performance Credits:
Jan Luby: voice.
Brent Jensen: soprano sax.
James Zitro: bell, bowl and cymbal roll.
Tim: all other acoustic and MIDI instruments.
Production Credits:
Recorded, mixed and mastered at the GallopAway Music studio in San Juan Bautista, CA, except James Zitro recorded in Monterey Bay Recording Studio in Castroville, CA; and Brent Jensen recorded in Kevin Kirk’s Onomatopoeia studio in Boise, Idaho, with my brother Tom Tompkins producing.
Futzie Nutzle’s drawings are posted under the same copyright terms as our other content: CC-BY-ND. For uses other than those covered by the CC-BY-ND terms, please contact GallopAway Music online or at PO Box 135, San Juan Bautista, CA, 95045.