When the moon calls

Reflections on the Harvest Moon

Photo by Photo by Federico Orihuela.

What is it about the moon that stops so many of us in our tracks?

Have you ever thought about that before?

We see the moon often; it’s a regular sight, which some might call ordinary. Yet, when the moon is big and round and glowing across the sky, so many of us pause in reverence.

Last night’s Harvest Supermoon did just that to me. The glow of my laptop screen shined brightly on my face as I typed away—deep in school discussions about both racial and religious divides—but this glow was nothing compared to the yellow moon that ascended into the heavens, a beacon, a flashlight, a lighthouse in the night sky.

I stopped everything I was doing and ran outside as if a wave pulled by an invisible tide, gravity tugging me toward the moon. Camera in hand, click click click, I tried to capture even a fraction of the moon’s radiance, but no photo could ever do justice to the moon’s celestial beauty.

I come alive at night when everyone else is sleeping. Finally, finally, everything is quiet. I think a lot of mothers can relate. We rise like the moon—feeding babies when the Earth is calm, typing poetry into our phones.

In the night, when everything is hidden, the moon remains—a silent guardian—promising a way home.

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I Was Never Able to Pray

By Edward Hirsch

Wheel me down to the shore
where the lighthouse was abandoned
and the moon tolls in the rafters.

Let me hear the wind paging through the trees
and see the stars flaring out, one by one,
like the forgotten faces of the dead.

I was never able to pray,
but let me inscribe my name
in the book of waves

and then stare into the dome
of a sky that never ends
and see my voice sail into the night.

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The Harvest Moon

By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

It is the Harvest Moon! On gilded vanes
And roofs of villages, on woodland crests
And their aerial neighborhoods of nests
Deserted, on the curtained window-panes
Of rooms where children sleep, on country lanes
And harvest-fields, its mystic splendor rests!
Gone are the birds that were our summer guests,
With the last sheaves return the laboring wains!
All things are symbols: the external shows
Of Nature have their image in the mind,
As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves;
The song-birds leave us at the summer's close,
Only the empty nests are left behind,
And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.

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The New Moon

By Sara Teasdale

Day, you have bruised and beaten me,
As rain beats down the bright, proud sea,
Beaten my body, bruised my soul,
Left me nothing lovely or whole—
Yet I have wrested a gift from you,
Day that dies in dusky blue:

For suddenly over the factories
I saw a moon in the cloudy seas—
A wisp of beauty all alone
In a world as hard and gray as stone—
Oh who could be bitter and want to die
When a maiden moon wakes up in the sky?

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Moonlight

by James W. Whilt

When the moon has climbed the heavens,
And the sun has gone to rest,
And the evening shadows gather,
That's the time I love the best.

Seated by our little camp-fire,
In the forest dark and tall,
With the silence all around us,
Save the roar of water-fall—

Then the deer steal in the meadows,
Velvet shod, so still are they,
While among the waving grass-tops
Spotted fawns are there at play.

Then to me there comes a memory,
Of the days, now past and gone,
When my life was just in blossom,
I was young and life was dawn.

When I roamed the virgin forest,
Just as free as birds that fly,
With the moonbeams for a candle,
And my cover was the sky.

Still the moon shines just as brightly,
And the stars are just as clear,
But I see I'm growing older
Like the ending of the year.

Frost is gathering on my temple,
Soon my hair will be like snow,
But His will we all must follow
And some day we all must go.

Yet, I'm ever, ever hoping
That upon those shores of gold,
We will have the self-same moonlight
As we had in the days of old.

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