Moon was full August 11, and it surprised me on the horizon as a huge orange orb, rising behind a tree. Rob and I were sitting on our boat, enjoying the vibes down at the club.
The next night we invited Alex and Penny for dinner and watched it rise, appearing huge and full on a summer night.
Have this collection of poetry on my bedside table, keeping me company. Some classics and also several poets new to me, including the one below.
The Worshipful Company of Moonwatchers
Among moongazers there may be one
Who has disappeared from among us under years of sense and sanity,
Who has disappeared from among us under years of sense and sanity,
Joined those who sleep behind curtains, drawn so thick
No light will wake him until the hour he appointed.
His evenings are spent on what he planned to do;
His early mornings are preparation for the day.
And then, after an illness perhaps, he is back
As surprised as we are each time, when, after an absence -
An interval when we are wrapped in our lives -
We are surprised by the moon. He is back
Moon-watching again; gets up in night, goes to the window
And sees the effects of a great moon roaring
Rushing like a tide through the belt of trees,
Tossing the ship of cloud bearing the effulgence
Which shows the violent busyness of this high world,
The life his sleeping household, dreaming children
And the street and whole town of safe, shut little houses
Are oblivious to.
Now once again he is out under the moon.
After the ghostly galleons of all our childhoods
The betrayed lover's moon we have crooned and sighed to
The hunter's, the bomber's moon enabling death
The harvest moon that made night day for farmers
And ended entangled in a hawthorn hedge
Like a huge football we could run to and touch.
He has gone down into the strange night garden
To watch her travel, her woe-begone face
Shifting behind the contrary wisps of clouds;
And it is as though all these moons are there:
The moon becalmed among flocked clouds,
Then suddenly reigning alone in an empty deep sky.
The moon glittering on the sea, lands away,
The little moon as frail as arrowed plane tracks
Dissolving in a summer dawn.
The blue cold wash off sterile mountains, the malign overseer
Something is there
Behind his shoulder, outside the window, at the back of the door.
He knows he has been pulled into the moon's orbit, into her circle,
That he is in air other than
The air of day.
The realm of faery, it was one time called
Where fantasy is bred, and desire shaked through the body
And the moon draws her net, pulling the tides
Of the land as she does of the sea.
[Jenny Joseph]
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