Friday Writings #150: How high the moon?

 

Fly me to the moon

How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank!

Blue moon, you saw me standing alone

Ah, Moon of my Delight who know’st no wane

In my craft or sullen art / Exercised in the still night / When only the moon rages

Bad moon rising

Blue moon of Kentucky, keep on shining.


The moon has long been regarded as the muse of poets. (Clearly this includes songwriters.) It made perfect sense to me when I discovered that The Moon is one of my ‘life cards’ in the Tarot.

Some years ago a woman called Maggie Strongheart invited people on facebook to connect with the moon every night for a month and write about it. Being poets, my friends Helen Patrice and Jennie Fraine and I of course wrote poems. We combined them into a self-published book, Three Cycles of the Moon. We’re still proud of it, and it’s recently been re-released on Amazon, as both an ebook and a paperback. 

In my case the moon has fascinated and comforted me since my childhood, when it shone for years in through my high, uncurtained bedroom window. Later, when I had children of my own and used to write my poems while the rest of the family slept, it shone through the window of my study.

I’m betting many of you have a relationship with the moon, too.

For your optional prompt this week, I invite you to write about the moon.

Guidelines: One post per person, poetry or prose, new or old, on prompt or not, 369 words maximum (excluding title and notes). Add a link to that post below; and please if possible visit others’ links and leave an encouraging comment. Also you may comment here with any messages for the team, or for the group as a whole.

Next week, our awesome Magaly will invite us to write poetry or prose inspired by the following lines, from Mary Oliver’s “The Uses of Sorrow”:

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness. 

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.