Big Moon Energy

To celebrate the harvest moon who graced us with its largely unimpressed reflective visage on September 20, and to celebrate the equinox today, September 22, at 2:20pm, here are three poems I think about when I think about the moon.

• John Donne’s “A Valediction: of weeping”
  • “….O more than moon, // Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere,….”
  • When I’m happy I can’t look at the moon without thinking “O more than moon…..” and when I’m sad, I can’t look at the moon without thinking “Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere.”
  • John Donne intimidated me a lot when I was an undergraduate first encountering his work, because he sometimes seems to disregard whether a reader can follow his sentences or train of thought, but I liked a few of his phrases (like the above). Once I began listening to the sounds in his poems rather than trying to “get” his poems, I liked them a lot better. Still, lots of people are annoyed with how widely read he is, given how difficult he can be to “access.”
  • The above link will take you to the poem, and this link will take you to an analysis of, or “guide” to the poem, in case you find the old-timey language stuffy at first and would like to read someone else writing about what might be going on with it.
• Kaveh Akbar’s “Being in This World Makes Me Feel Like a Time Traveller”
  • The poem is also in his first book Calling a Wolf a Wolf.
  • Here’s an interview Kaveh did with The Rumpus in which he discusses this poem.
  • The mooniest part is below:

One day I stopped in a lobby for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres
and ever since, the life of this world has seemed still. Every night,

the moon unpeels itself without affectation. It’s exhausting, remaining
humble amidst the vicissitudes of fortune. It’s difficult
to be anything at all with the whole world right here for the having.

• Paige Lewis’s “On the Train a Man Snatches My Book, Reads”
  • I found the poem on their twitter, from when they published it Gulf Coast magazine, but it’s also in their first book Space Struck.