is it wise, or is it nothing at all?

.よ所からはさぞ此島を月見哉
yoso kara wa sazo kono shima wo tsukimi kana

elsewhere, no doubt
someone's viewing this island
this moon

issa

how many moon stories would you tell
if you told all of your moon stories?
have you watched its flirtations?
has it laid balm to your loneliness?

has it been prominent in your arts?
un chien andelou? moonstruck?
is it a symbol, or are you?
was it your only light?

HUNGER MOON

The last full moon of February
stalks the fields;
barbed wire casts a shadow.
Rising slowly,
a beam moved toward the west
stealthily changing position

until now, in the small hours,
across the snow
it advances on my pillow
to wake me,
not rudely like the sun
but with the cocked gun
of silence.

I am alone in a vast room
where a vain woman once slept.
The moon,
in pale buckskins, crouches
on guard beside her bed.

Slowly the light wanes,
the snow will melt
and all the fences thrum
in the spring breeze
but not until that sleeper, trapped
in my body, turns and turns.

Jane Cooper

from The Flashboat: Poems Collected and Reclaimed.
Copyright © 2000 by Jane Cooper.

think of everyone watching
as you do tonight.

high wild heather

EXMOOR

Lost aboard the roll of Kodac-
olor that was to have super-
seded all need to remember
Somerset were: a large flock

of winter-bedcover-thick-
pelted sheep up on the moor;
a stile, a church spire,
and an excess, at Porlock,

of tenderly barbarous antique
thatch in tandem with flower-
beds, relentlessly pictur-
esque, along every sidewalk;

a millwheel; and a millbrook
running down brown as beer.
Exempt from the disaster.
however, as either too quick

or too subtle to put on rec-
ord, were these: the flutter
of, beside the brown water,
with a butterfly-like flick

of fan-wings, a bright black-
and-yellow wagtail; at Dulver-
ton on the moor, the flavor
of the hot toasted teacake

drowning in melted butter
we had along with a bus-tour-
load of old people; the driver

's way of smothering every r
in the wool of a West Countr-
y diphthong, and as a Somer-

set man, the warmth he had for
the high, wild, heather-
dank wold he drove us over.

Amy Clampitt

From The Collected Poems of
Amy Clampitt,
published by Alfred A. Knopf.
Copyright © 1997.