The Full Moon

Tonight there will be a "super full moon," the largest to be seen in almost 20 years. Sadly here in the city it will be obscured by street lights and wires and all of the inconsequential paraphernalia that relegates nature to a sideshow.

When I see it rising large over the buildings I will long for a grassy knoll far away in the countryside without a city wall where I can stand in the pale light of this lonely satellite.

Some people are affected by the moon. I have never thought much of this but I wonder now; I wonder if its light will illuminate a path somewhere.

 “The last full moon so big and close to Earth occurred in March of 1993,” Geoff Chester of the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington D.C. told USA Today.


The Super Moon will appear especially large because the moment of perigee—when the moon is closest to the Earth in its monthly rotation—will coincide with the appearance of a perfectly full moon, apparently.

It's hard not to look at the moon and to feel shiver run through your body or to imagine the features of a perfectly well known stranger.

But Shelley should have the last word because Shelley had a way with words, even if his moon was no super moon but a frail and lonely fragment in a cold sea of cloud.


To The Moon

Art thou pale for weariness

Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth, -
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?




Percy Bysshe Shelley