Late last night I looked out of the small window in our back door and was amazed that the magnificent moon of Thursday and Friday hadn’t waned – it was just mistier. So I wrote the following poem. I’ve included a copy on the page with the poem Once in a Blue Moon.
Watching the Moon
Separated
By a smeared window in our back door
Tendrils
Of the willow in our back garden
A veil
Of mist and cosmic dust
Miles and miles of galaxy
Haunted by the August moon
Suspended
Like the apples on our apple tree
Held
In the hand of the universe
Dancing
Slowly
Face to face
In synchronous rotation with Earth
One thing that I remember from my childhood is the first moon landing. At the time, I felt removed from news and events shown on the television and discussed on the radio, but the moon landing drew me in. I was mesmerised by the fuzzy pictures beamed down from space and tried to imagine what it would be like to tread in moon dust, how would it smell up there and was the dark side of the moon different from the side we always see. To me, it looked as if the astronauts were on a giant trampoline. And once they got moving, how could they stop! What prevented them from bouncing right off the moon and into space? The moon we saw in photographs taken by the astronauts was covered with mountains and valleys and what looked like snow. But what made the biggest impression on me was the blackness that surrounded the moon.
When I first moved to Norfolk, the dark nights reminded me of those first images of the moon. In London, the sky was polluted with light from buildings, vehicles and street lights. The village I moved to was on the North Norfolk coast, had no street lights and not much traffic. Imagine my delight when I walked out of my back door into what was for me pitch dark, with million of stars above me and, of course, the moon. My first thought was that the moon would smell just like the North Norfolk coast.
writing in north norfolk 