Many Regrets
To Cath
What fetches of the wind,
What visions of the stars
And illusions of the sea,
What infinite horizons
And beaches in the sun,
What endless worlds had I done
Had not the glories
Of that moon so shone?
And what other immortality
Than its life gleaming down on me?
May 17th, 2022
Kaiholu
Explanation
I know some immortal poet wrote a line similar to the last line above, but I’ve racked my brains, my books, and the web futilely to find it.
I wrote this quatrain to cosset my half-remembered line:
All the worlds
All the stars that might have been,
Had not I loved the lights within:
So many poems had I done,
Had not the bright world so shone!
“Many Regrets” 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 moonrise in Hawaii on May 15th and 16th in 2022, and what self-respecting wolf doesn’t get out for a bit of howling?