"The Waning Moon," by Percy Bysshe Shelley

"The Waning Moon," by Percy Bysshe Shelley

 Reading/video of a short poem by the famous British Romantic poet, Shelley, 1792-1822. Husband of Mary Shelley.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjBy-Bx8C-k

"Under the Harvest Moon," by Carl Sandburg

 Reading/video of a short poem by Carl Sandburg.

link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te8eVKe063E

"Length of Moon," by Arna Bontemps

Short reading/video of poem by Arna Bontemps, Harlem Renaissance poet, professor, editor, novelist, and librarian. His historical novel, Black Thunder, based on an actual slave uprising, is terrific.

link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVau0JZ9CHY

Chewing Moon

As I reached for the moon,
it shrank to the size of my hand.
Then it turned into a disc
no thicker than a sandwich.

Coincidentally, I took two
bites out of it. The texture:
that of sugar granules.
Taste: smoky lemon.

The moon in my hand bled
dark green where my teeth
had seized lunar flesh. Stung
by self-rebuke, I put the moon

back where I had found it, or
almost. It healed in its orbit.


hans ostrom 2018

"Dusk in Autumn," by Sara Teasdale

The Moon in Those Wild Magma Years

("The Moon May Have Had a Heavy Metal Atmosphere with Supersonic Winds,"
by Lisa Grossman, Science News, June 2017)


We thought we knew the moon:
pale and cool, the hard-working
servant of love, myth, tides,
Americans, and a genre called horror.

Turns out in its youth, the moon
was a crazy ball of magma, so hot
it vaporized metal and forged
an atmosphere, which brought

winds so blastful they made
waves in magma. (Surf this, bro.)
Finally this heat-addicted sphere
went straight, got clean, dried

out.  It slept it off under blankets
of sodium snow. When it awoke, it
had pock-marks. With chill indifference
it received cordial light from the sun.



hans ostrom 2017

Plain as Day

"As plain as day," they say.
That's not very plain.
Revelations of sun's light
bewilder much more than
those of the moon's, which
is plainly a universal blue kiss.




hans ostrom 2-17

"Exculpatory"

Not that you asked, but I like
the word exculpatory.
Its syllabation, to be more
or less precise.

The syllables make me think
of frogs croaking avidly,
singing exculpatory!
but never in unison,
for croaking is a kind of chaos,
free-form pond-jazz,
musical theater of
puffed-up slick lawyers
raising evidentiary objections to a judge:
the moon, which reflects a hidden law.

Syllables, a pond, the murky,
mucked up border between water
and land, frogs, moonlight--yes,
an excellent grouping
to host in my mammalian cranium
tonight as I scribble and scrawl
a way through
the dim light of my obscurity
to which I have been no not
syllabled but sentenced.


hans ostrom 2015

"To the Moon," Charlotte Smith

"Nocturne," by Gwendolyn Bennett

"A White Blossom," by D.H. Lawrence

"Winter Moon," by Langston Hughes