Skip to main content

Why the Moon Needs a Nap

Whose turn is it to watch for paradise? - Sarah Ann Winn

With first slip of daylight, I let loose hounds
of dark roast to a  growling grinder, cracking
the quiet of thick frost and apricot overcast.  
My black dog stretches in sun salute as we meet
a crescent moon. She looks a bit ragged and thin.

Winter slows many things, sap and squirrels, but
not the brooding of poets and farmers - incessant
is their surveillance.  The moon needs a nap, drapes her face
with cirrus clouds; tries to overlook the millstones:
neap tides, menses, frazzled lunatics – tugging, tugging, tugging.

No wonder Selene stumbles narcoleptic spring to fall.
No wonder with each waning crescent, her sagacious gifts
surrender to rain. She needs a nap. There are blueprints
to dream for April,  and a naked winter world
expects night escort, November to Spring.  

No wonder Diana croons in the vernal chirr of peeper and toad.
Even beside groundhogs, she’d lay, seek a sluggish eclipse,
to catch a month of winks. She deserves a nap. Keep in mind,
we want her ready to romance a juicy May and June. Then, hold
her fixed with second wind for equinox, light steady for long harvests.

I’m holding my moon vigil this morning until the ghostly thumbnail
evaporates out of sight, but not out of mind. And tomorrow
it’s a quiet cup of PG Tips, I’ll sip, try to keep the ruckus down.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Covid19 Journey Day 27

April 17, 2020 Today’s celebration – Last May I attended the annual school fundraising gala.   Browsing the items on the silent auction tables, I found nothing that that stirred my avarice, so I took another tack and decided to find things that I could have fun with or devise pleasure from, as a way to justify some necessary opening bids.   There was an impressive box of chocolate bars with a couple bottles of red on which I entered the first bid, and I paused at a wooden crate with another pair of wines, nice glasses and a gift certificate for a charcuterie tray.   The vintner of the Pinot Noir and Chardonnay was Kosta Browne. Without a thought of the initial bid being the winning bid, I scratched my offer on line #1 - $150. I did covet a set of hand thrown mugs from our headmaster’s wheel, but found my bid lost in the healthy bid escalations.   By the end of the evening though, I was the winner of the box of wine and chocolate and the two bottles of Kosta Browne.   Once at home
1 comment
Read more

Pandemic Journey Day 49

May 9, 2020 Today’s mind experiment – this morning, I launched the thought experiment by watching a shared video called Coronavirus from Outer Space – Professor Wickramasinghe, Astrobiologist.  The channel is Green Tara Guru. The production behind Dr. Wickramasinghe’s mini-lecture was fun; his home office video was surrounded by a frame, embellished with space CGI and supporting image video clips for what he is describing at any moment, as well as, a celestial music soundtrack.  (My students would love if I were able to produce such lecture videos for them.) It was released May 1, 2020, and has a paltry three hundred fifty-nine views, one of which is mine.  After watching the video, I did my customary search about Dr. Wickramasinghe’s background.  He is a broadly publish an award-winning British mathematician and astronomer born in Sri Lanka in 1939. In the 1960’s he worked with theoretical physicist Dr. Fred Hoyle on a radical kind of panspermia (the idea that life is distributed thro
Post a Comment
Read more

2020 Pandemic Journey Day 44

May 4, 2020 Today’s idea – What has the fog of our modern conveniences begat? I read an article last night published in 1950 by Berton Roueche’ titled The Fog . In October 1948, a toxic smog settled on the borough of Donora, PA. This town is tucked away on a meander of the Monongahela River in the Allegheny Mountains.   During that time, it was home to three huge mills, a steel plant, and a zinc and sulfuric acid plant. The towering factory stacks of these industries pushed out thick plumes of coal smoke all day and all week. Also, given the town’s proximity to the river, boats and trains added their emission to the cocktail. To seal the deal, Donora sits in the topography of secluded bluffs and hills that allow for little or no wind to carry the smoke and fumes out of town.   So the place was known to be a smutty, smokey mess, tolerated by residents who referred to the sulfurous stench as the smell of money. On this weekend in October, a thermal inversion put a tighter lid of the
Post a Comment
Read more