Many, many years ago in a place far away, my daughter (10 yrs old at the time) wrote a poem that was published in the magazine Highlights for Children.
Sea Creatures, Space Creatures
The squid is a rocket.
And a rocket goes into space.
So that means there must be stars.
Yes, there are stars. The starfish, of course!
And the sun is a sunfish!
And the moon is a moonfish.
The asteroids are rockfish.
Maybe it caught the editor's eye only because it was submitted from Japan. I don't suppose kids from Iowa or Wyoming spend much time thinking about the shape of squid. In any case, I thought my daughter was a genius. I'd never even heard of a moonfish before seeing this poem, but a surreptitious peek in the encyclopedia assured me she hadn't made the creature up.
When I saw the topic for this week's Illustration Friday, I thought of this poem and how the sea and its creatures were a metaphor for outer space. So I drew a moonfish. The accompanying words are from a golden oldie written by Bart Howard (sung by Frank Sinatra) that has been stuck in my head ever since we rented a DVD of the movie Space Cowboys last week.
[oops, there seems to be more than one version of the lyrics to this song running loose on the internet, and I probably got the wrong one. Oh, well...]
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