The
Moon (a brief essay)
by
Sheri Grutz
Poets
and the mentaly ill alike, love songs about the moon by Pink Floyd,
drawing that connection to lunacy and shifts in mood and tides,
trying to figure out what the moon means to us, and for us, as
humans. Consider the beginning of this poem, by Joseph Gordon
Macleod:
Moonpoison,
mullock of sacrifice,
Suffuses
the veins of the eyes
Till
the retina, mooncoloured,
Sees
the sideways motion of the cretin crab
Hued
thus like a tortoise askew in the glaucous moonscape
A
flat hot boulder it
Lividly
in the midst of the Doldrums
He
made 3 words out that moon and gets to the question at the end of the
poem:
Is
there nothing more soluble, more gaseous, more imperceptible?
Nothing.
That
the moon would “abhor” us on earth in our burial grounds, hard to
believe there's a place called heaven, and the relation here to a
sideways moving crab to that of our eyes.
Consider
this poem by Linda Pastan:
Isn't
the moon dark too,
most
of the time?
And
doesn't the white page
seem
unfinished
without
the dark stain
of
alphabets?
When
God demanded light,
he
didn't banish darkness.
Instead
he invented
ebony
and crows
and
that small mole
on
your left cheekbone.
Or
did you mean to ask
"Why
are you sad so often?"
Ask
the moon.
Ask
what it has witnessed.
She
too has hinted that we too are that light of non-noon, but given a
darkness about this existence to think, possibly all is not true in
the world, but I remain constant as that moon.
Here's
partially another one by George Oppen:
what
then
what spirit
Of
the bent seas
Archangel
of
the tide
brimming
in
the moon-streak
comes
in whose absence
earth
crumbles
What
I take from this is that everything might be a miracle, the balancing
of the planet, the moon rising high and lofty in it's pursuit.
Here's
a line of one my poems:
“This
melancholy has a holy design written on the side of the moon....I
fall into its deep grooves.”
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