Category Archives: Moon

Sunset and Moonglow

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img_7667jdbphoto 1/20/2019

Sunset and Moonglow

This moon is not derivative of any other moon.
If I called it a blood moon, I chose my words too soon.
It did not glow as brightly as that vivid red that flowed
when his heartbeat lengthened. When his breathing slowed.

It did not flow as scarlet as life lost by human hand.
It did not pool and sink into the all-obscuring sand.
It’s true that nature paints with blood when mortal creatures die,
but it casts a subtler color when painted on the sky.

The earth is not a marble. Night skies aren’t plastered with stars.
There’s no earthly equivalent for Jupiter or Mars.
When we use manmade metaphors to capture universal
beauties like the evening sky, it seems a real reversal.

When we dream of lovers’ eyes, they should shine like stars.
Stars should not merely twinkle like fireflies caught in jars.
Candy floss swells like a cloud, a sunflower’s like the sun.
Not the other way around. And when the day is done,

the sunset simply is itself and no artist can
duplicate its subtlety with pigments coined by man.

The prompt words today are marble, plaster, derivative and dream.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/01/21/rdp-monday-marble/
https://fivedotoh.com/2019/01/21/fowc-with-fandango-plaster/
https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2019/01/21/your-daily-word-prompt-derivative-january-21-2019/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2019/01/21/dream/

On the Night of the Blood Moon

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Click on the first photo to enlarge all.

I just couldn’t stop taking photos of the moon on this night of a full lunar eclipse. These may not be the best shots, but I was out there for two hours and I’m soooo sleepy. Strangely, this poem I posted earlier this year to one of Mark’s prompts popped up with the photos in my media file when I posted them. Don’t know how its link got recorded as a jpeg nor how it got here, but it seems to want to be posted again, so here it is:

Lucid Moon

With half a life lived in the dark,
an owl’s hoot, an answering bark,
the moon across the water scattered,
ragged clouds, wispy and battered––

I float in night and solitude,
the night determining my mood.
I lie in darkness and I brood,
a nightly lucid interlude.

When sunlight comes in fits and starts,
The day brings out my other parts.
They rise in me from dawn to noon,
dispelling powers of the moon.

Thus balanced between dark and light,
each half consumes its daily bite.
I welcome each within its time
Life varied, balanced and sublime.

Matt’s prompt today was “Lucidity.”  The common meaning of “Lucid” is “clearly expressed” or “easy to understand,” but another meaning is “bright or luminous.”

Moonstruck

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Moonstruck

I am blinded by the rising moon,
as there above the old shed,
it broadcasts
that elsewhere in a larger world
all is well
and as intended.

 

The prompt words today were broadcast, shed and moonstruck.

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/11/20/rdp-tuesday-broadcast/
https://fivedotoh.com/2018/11/20/fowc-with-fandango-shed/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2018/11/20/moonstruck/

Revelation in Twilight: 19 Studies of the Moon

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Revelation in Twilight

This morning I woke early—an hour before light
obscured my vision of the moon, hanging like a kite
in the night-stained sky, there through my window bars.
suspended high up in a sky devoid of clouds or stars.

Just a minute later, it moved along with me
to float the pool’s surface that only I could see.
Too soon the sun would come, its golden light to douse.
But for now, it followed me as I walked through my house.

Friendly moon to loiter in my company.
It seemed this early morning that both of us were free
to spend a few rare moments quietly alone.
Both of us free-floating in the twilight zone.

(Please click on first photo to enlarge all.)

 

 

 

The prompt today was revelation. All photos by jdb.

Full Moon: JNW’s Halloween Challenge, Oct 28, 2016

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I can’t resist taking photos of the full moon. Perhaps this is why:

The Moon is Full and Waiting

 The moon is full and waiting, and though the night is chill,
my true love expects me over yonder hill.
His ardent call invites me to join him for the night,
and yet I dread the cold cold wind and the failing light.
If I were only twenty, I’d have no choice to make;
but I have guests arriving and sweet bites yet to bake.

My true love lies waiting over yonder hill,
but he’ll return another night. I am sure he will,
for he has no other to overlook his flaws:
the roughness of his ardor, the power of his jaws.
His embrace often bruises, though this is not his intent.
In the excess of his ardor, only tenderness is meant.

The warm cave of our meeting carves out yonder hill,
but tonight I will not join him. It may be I never will.
Tomorrow night the full moon will partially be spent,
and perhaps on next month’s equal, once more I won’t relent.
Perhaps I’ll find another closer to my kind,
though an equal to his passion I’m unlikely to find.

A swift wind blows the clouds away to clear the shrouded moon.
My guests will be arriving. I know it will be soon.
I stir in leavening powder. I stir in heavy cream.
Across the hand I stir with falls the moon’s broad beam.
I drop the spoon and go again to open up the door.
I hear the gentle song of wind, my lover’s beckoning roar.

I answer with a beat of blood. A spasm in my thigh
invites me to be climbing over distant hill and high.
The crumbs fall from my fingers as I run into the night.
I do not feel the bruising stones or the wind’s cold bite.
My lover calls me onward, and once again I go.
For when the full moon calls me, not once have I said no.

(If this poem sounds familiar, it is because it is a rewrite of one I posted earlier. It is just so appropriate for today’s photo prompt, that I couldn’t resist posting it again.)

https://jennifernicholewells.com/2016/10/28/jnws-halloween-challenge-full-moon/

NaPoWriMo Day 15: Lunar Eclipse

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Image

Lunar Eclipse

Last night I rose to watch the full eclipse––
a blood orange moon, full in the dark night sky,
around it, scattered stars and tall palm tips.

It was as though in this world, only I
watched the last fingernail of glowing moon,
chewed at by shadow, slowly wane and die.

And then the night birds with their lonely croon
gave timbre to this darkened night soon joined
by lonely burro, braying for the moon

as though they mourned for vision now purloined
or simply sang for joy of adding to
the beauty of this dark moon newly coined.

Then once again the moon’s edge came to view.
Earth moved aside in favor of the sun
and for an hour, I watched as moonlight grew.

Then sought my bed, the pageant not yet done,
as light increased and shadow slowly waned.
Inevitably, once more light had won.

The ending known, no mystery remained.

Image

Our prompt today was to write a poem in terza rima, a form invented by Dante and used in The Divine Comedy. It consists of three-line stanzas, with a “chained” rhyme scheme. The first stanza is ABA, the second is BCB, the third is CDC, and so on. No particular meter is necessary, but English poets have tended to default to iambic pentameter. One common way of ending a terza rima poem is with a single line standing on its own, rhyming with the middle line of the preceding three-line stanza.

See more blood moon photos here: https://judydykstrabrown.com/2015/09/27/eclipse-of-the-blood-moon-over-mexico/