The Rhyming Full Moon of June

The June 2023 Full Moon, popularly called the Strawberry Moon, will be on tonight, June 3 at 11:42 PM EDT or June 4 at 3:42 AM UTC. Okay, it will look very full even on the 3rd no matter what time zone you’re in. This third Full Moon of spring occurs about two weeks before the Summer Solstice. It is the Full Moon in Sagittarius.

“June” and “Moon” is a simple rhyme and there is no lack of poems about the Moon, and poems in which the Moon makes an appearance in its full or other phases. In an essay on “Poetry and the Moon” by Mary Ruefle, she says:

I am convinced that the first lyric poem was written at night, and that the moon was witness to the event and that the event was witness to the moon. For me, the moon has always been the very embodiment of lyric poetry. In the West, lyric poetry begins with a woman on an island in the seventh or sixth century BC, and I say now: lyric poetry begins with a woman on an island on a moonlit night, when the moon is nearing full or just the other side of it, or on the dot… Let’s call her Sappho. One can hardly say these little songs have survived—for we have only fragments—but even this seems fitting, for what is the moment but a fragment of greater time?

Tonight I’ve watched
the moon and then
the Pleiades
go down

The night is now
half-gone; youth
goes; I am

in bed alone

Sappho sees the Moon and the Pleiades which is a group of more than 800 stars located about 410 light-years from Earth in the constellation Taurus. But they would have been known for far fewer stars that can be seen by the naked eye which we call the “Seven Sisters” (and the less poetic Messier 45). The name comes from a Greek legend. The Pleiades are the seven daughters of the Titan god Atlas and the ocean nymph Pleione. During an ancient war, Atlas rebelled against Zeus, the king of the gods, who sentenced his foe to forever hold up the heavens on his shoulders. The sisters were so sad that Zeus allowed them a place in the sky in order to be close to their father.

There is a section of the poem “To the Moon” by Percy Bysshe Shelley that is often shown as its own short poem.

Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing Heaven, and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,—
And ever changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy

Shelley asks the Moon why it is pale and answers for the satellite.

Emily Dickinson has several lunar poems. In this one, he sees a Full Moon (maybe not exactly full since it looks that way for several days) that had looked different just a few nights ago. When do you think the Moon has phase with a “Chin of Gold”?

The Moon was but a Chin of Gold
A Night or two ago—
And now she turns Her perfect Face
Upon the World below—

If we keep reading Emily’s poem, we start to wonder if she is really writing about the Moon at all.

Her Forehead is of Amplest Blonde—
Her Cheek—a Beryl hewn—
Her Eye unto the Summer Dew
The likest I have known—

Her Lips of Amber never part—
But what must be the smile
Upon Her Friend she could confer
Were such Her Silver Will …

Carl Sandburg’s “Moonset” is an odd one and not what I would think is typical for him.

Leaves of poplars pick Japanese prints against the west
Moon sand on the canal doubles the changing pictures.
The moon’s good-by ends pictures.
The west is empty. All else is empty. No moon-talk at all now.
Only dark listening to dark.

It’s not very surprising that Sylvia Plath sees the Moon a bit differently in “The Moon And The Yew Tree.”

The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness –

And to end my Moon gazing, a haiku.

The moon glows the same:
it is the drifting cloud forms
make it seem to change.
_ Basho

Lying in a hammock

Photo: S Migaj

It isn’t summer for another month, but it only takes a few hot days and things growing in the garden to put me into summer mode. Today I was lying on the couch outside in the Sun, feeling lazy and feeling good, and thinking about this poem by James Wright where he is “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota.”

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

by James Wright, from his Collected Poems

The Many Moons of February

The February Full Moon this year appears tonight.

Tonight’s lunar phase is often called the Snow or Ice Moon and Storm Moon for rather obvious reasons in many parts of the Northern Hemisphere. Tonight’s Full Moon is also called the Bone Moon, Famine Moon, or Hunger Moon. What do all these names have in common? It is a kind of harshness of the season. In Paradelle, February is usually the coldest month and often has the most snow. Last month, we had no snow here in the New York / New Jersey area and January was fairly mild. In the few days of this new month, we have dipped down to zero degrees.

The February Full Moon can also be called the Trappers Moon or the Raccoon Moon. that references animals and hunters. The Native American names Old Moon, (which can also be the January Moon) and Grandfather Moon suggest how this difficult month can make any of us feel old.

The unusual name of The Shoulder to Shoulder Around the Fire Full Moon comes from the Wishram people of the Northwest Coast and I imagine them huddled shoulder to shoulder around the fire when this cold Moon was full.

It was ten years ago that I discovered and wrote that the Finnish term for this month is helmikuu. It means “month of the pearl” and those pearls are not from oysters but from the image of snow melting on tree branches and forming droplets that freeze again like pearls.

Tonight’s Micromoon Is Still Full

A view of Earth from our Moon. We look micro.

You’ve heard of the Supermoon, right? That is when the Full Moon is at its closest point (perigee) to Earth. It looks a bit larger to the naked eye. It’s not an astronomical term but more of a popularized term.

So, it is no surprise that the opposite – a micromoon – began to be used when a Full Moon or a New Moon coincides with apogee – the point in the Moon’s orbit farthest away from Earth.

The Moon orbits Earth in an elliptical path, which means one side of the path is closer to the Earth than the other.

The January 2023 Full Moon is typically called the Wolf Moon. It will be full at 6:08 PM EST or 11:08 PM UTC. It is considered to be the first Full Moon of the Winter 2022-2023 season as the December 2022 Full Moon occurred prior to the Winter Solstice. This is the Full Moon in Cancer.

How different will the Moon look tonight? It is further away and looks approximately 14% smaller than a Supermoon – though that is easy to discern to the naked eye. The illuminated area appears 30% smaller, so it might look a little less bright.

Old folklore accounts suggest that Full, New, Super, and Micro Moons all affect human mental health and bring on natural disasters, like earthquakes, but no scientific evidence supports any such correlation. Still, be on the lookout tonight…

The Little Spirit Moon Shines on the Red Road

Tonight, the December Full Moon will be full in my part of the world at 11:08 p.m. For other places, it will be officially full in the early morning of December 8.

This month’s Full Moon is often called the rather dull and generic Cold Moon. December is when winter really begins in most of the Northern Hemisphere. Of course, parts of the U.S. and the world have already had significant snowfall and cold weather. In Paradelle, there hasn’t been snow yet, but we have had nights below freezing and almost all the plants have died or gone into their winter phase and the trees have lost their leaves. It is no surprise that in our hemisphere most of the ancient names for this Full Moon are related to the low temperatures and darkness. Long Nights Moon is another fairly common name. The Anglo-Saxon name was the Moon Before Yule, anticipating the ancient celebration around the winter solstice.

The winter solstice is still two weeks away, but ancient people were more likely to track the changing seasons by following the lunar month rather than the solar year. The Moon is much easier to observe and the 12 months in our modern calendar are based on that observation.

The Moon names used by the many Native American tribes are usually more interesting (and sometimes harder for me to find etymologies for) and vary based on geography and climate. The cold brings the Hoar Frost Moon, Moon of the Popping Trees, Winter Maker Moon and Drift Clearing Moon. The Choctaw people’s ancestral homeland spanned from most of central and southern Mississippi into parts of eastern Louisiana and western Alabama, so it is not surprising that in November it was the Sassafras Moon and December brings the Peach Moon.

The Anishnaabe (Chippewa, Ojibwe) people called this twelfth moon the Little Spirit Moon. It is a time of healing and recovery when we might receive both visions of the spirits and good health.

For many people, winter is a time to stay indoors and turn our attention to different tasks. Sailors might be mending sails and nets. Farmers might be repairing tools, preserving foods, storing meat and planning for spring planting. Warm-weather athletes might be recovering from injuries and training for a new season. Now that I can’t work in my garden and do outdoor projects, I turn inside with home projects and also increase my writing and painting.

It is a good time to walk the Red Road with pure intentions. The Red Road is a modern English-language concept of the right path in life. Though inspired by some Native American spiritual teachings, the term is used more in the Pan-Indian and New Age communities than amongst traditional Indigenous people. When I read Black Elk’s words, the metaphoric red road was a spiritual way of life. Oglala Sioux medicine man and holy man, Black Elk, saw everyone on the red road as being one interconnected circle of people. It is a sacred hoop that while you need to walk it alone, many others walk with you.

The metaphor had been adopted and adapted by groups from the Christian church to some modern addiction treatment programs. The idea of the Red Road as a way to recovery connects to the Little Spirit Moon.

I came across this book – 365 Days Of Walking The Red Road: The Native American Path to Leading a Spiritual Life Every Day – when I was reading for this post.
No review or recommendation – just a reference.

The Beaver Moon Will Be Eclipsed

Long-exposure photograph showing the Moon turning red during a lunar eclipse (CC0 1.0,
Public Domain)

On Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2022, Election Day, the moon will pass through the shadow of Earth resulting in a total lunar eclipse that will be seen from Oceania, the Americas, Asia, and Northern Europe. This will be the second and final lunar eclipse of this year.

The eclipse will begin in at 4:10 a.m. EST (0810 GMT) and will end at approximately 7:49 a.m. EDT (1149 GMT) when the moon once again emerges. It will be at maximum at about 6 a.m. EST.

During the total lunar eclipse, the moon may take on a brownish-red-hue that results from light from the sun hitting its disk after being bent around the Earth by our planet’s atmosphere, which also filters out blue light. Thus, this is sometimes given the unscientific nickname of a “Blood Moon.”

Why the Beaver Moon? This is the time of year when beavers begin to take shelter in their lodges, having laid up sufficient stores of food for winter. During the time when the fur trade in North America was an important industry, this was also the time to trap beavers for their thick, winter-ready pelts.

For eclipse specifics in your area, see timeanddate.com/eclipse… In my part of the country near New York City, the Penumbral Eclipse begins at 3:02:15 am and the Partial Eclipse begins at 4:09:12 am. A bit early for me. The Full Eclipse begins at 5:16:39 am and the Maximum Eclipse is at a more reasonable 5:59:11 am. The Full Eclipse ends at 6:41:36 am but by then it will be below the horizon. In fact, since I live between two mountains, the Moon will not be visible all that time as it would be if I was at sea level.