Blood Moon

I know some immortal poet wrote a line similar to the last line below, but I’ve racked my brains, my books, and the web futilely to find it.

I wrote this quatrain to cradle that half-remembered line:

All the world that might have been,
Had not I loved the world within:
So many poems had I done,
Had not the bright world so shone!

“Blood Moon” is another way of celebrating it. It’s the same idea as Yeats’s “The Choice,” or Dylan Thomas’s “In my craft or sullen art.”

There was a blood moon, created by the earth’s shadow eclipsing the moon at moon rise in Hawaii, on May 15th and 16th in 2022, and what self-respecting wolf doesn’t get out for a bit of howling?

I notice I wrote another, more explanatory poem to a blood moon in 2015. But this one in 2022 I wrote for Cathy, who had mentioned that it was going to happen, but couldn’t see it in California, where she was that day.

Dylan Thomas published a poem by someone else in his youth, not realizing that he’d memorized it, not written it. Of the last line in the quatrain above, I’m sure someone else wrote it, and it will drive me crazy until I find out who it was. As with Eliot’s line, “Till human voices wake us and we drown” from “Prufrock,” the line “Had not the bright world so shone” sums up the temptations in any poet’s life.

I remember the desperate trips to Jones Beach, or being pinched by crabs during my swimming lessons in Crab Pond in Chatham, but they were desperate, sad, unfulfilled, because they weren’t with the love of my life. They weren’t part of the plot. Beaches are attempts to find love, but they only work when they succeed. Beaches are a metaphor.