4-5-12 The Moon is Poetry

Child Moon 

The child's wonder

At the old moon

Comes back nightly.

She points her finger

To the far silent yellow thing

Shining through the branches

Filtering on the leaves a golden sand,

Crying with her little tongue, "See the moon!"

And in her bed fading to sleep

With babblings of the moon on her little mouth.

~Carl Sandburg

To the Moon

Art thou pale for weariness

Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,

Wandering companionless

Among the stars that have a different birth, - 

And ever changing, like a joyless eye

That finds no object worth its constancy?

~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Full Moon and Little Frieda

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket - 

And you listening. 

A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch. 

A pail lifted, still and brimming - mirror 

To tempt a first star to a tremor. 

Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm 

wreaths of breath - 

A dark river of blood, many boulders, 

Balancing unspilled milk. 

'Moon!' you cry suddenly, 'Moon! Moon!' 

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work 

That points at him amazed.

~Ted Hughes 

No longer throne of a goddess to whom we pray,
no longer the bubble house of childhood's
tumbling Mother Goose man,

The emphatic moon ascends –
the brilliant challenger of rocket experts,
the white hope of communications men.

Some I love who are dead
were watchers of the moon and knew its lore;
planted seeds, trimmed their hair,

Pierced their ears for gold hoop earrings
as it waxed or waned.
It shines tonight upon their graves.

And burned in the garden of Gethsemane,
its light made holy by the dazzling tears
with which it mingled.

And spread its radiance on the exile's path
of Him who was The Glorious One,
its light made holy by His holiness.

Already a mooted goal and tomorrow perhaps
an arms base, a livid sector,
the full moon dominates the dark.

~Robert Hayden