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

Palm Sunday

Today is Palm Sunday, the first day of the Christian Holy Week. When I was a child, this was a big week with multiple visits to church and lots of secular preparations for Easter Sunday. We got Easter clothing for going to church. My father always took photos of us. There was a bigger-than-usual brunch that day, usually at my grandparent’s home along with cousins, aunts, and uncles.

The religion was fairly clear in my mind. Or at least thought it was clear. Last night, the 1956 film The Ten Commandments was on TV and I started watching it. The film looks odd to my current eyes but I know I watched it at least a half dozen times as a kid. The acting is stiff, the casting is inauthentic, the special effects look dated and the color is overly intense. But my mom loved all the Bibical films. and the big three networks of that time tended to show them at the appropriate time of year annually.

Last year I wrote here about Easter and Passover similarities and differences and rewatching that film reminded me about how little my religious classes of that time told me about the similarities. Taking religion courses in college, the biggest takeaway for me was how similar all religions are in certain aspects.

Here is one of my little ronka poems about Palm Sunday

Moveable feast this Passover and Easter week.
No palms here, but crocuses, wood hyacinths,
jonquils, cherry blossoms, a first bee buzzing.
Yew Sunday, Branch Sunday, triumph and victory
contained in a seed, bud, pollen, flower.

Photo: Pexels.com

I’m not religious these days in any formal sense. I’m not a churchgoer. I have in-laws who are Jewish and so I have begun to celebrate Passover with a seder, which is a learning experience.

One of my strongest memories of Palm Sunday is getting the actual palms in church. Many people, including my mother, would weave them into rather elaborate crosses. But I did learn about why we had the palms.

Palm Sunday is a Christian moveable feast that falls on the Sunday before Easter that commemorates Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem where the people carried palm branches as a sign of respect. It happened a week before his resurrection. Sometimes it is called by other names, such as Passion Sunday, because the Gospel narrative of the Passion of Jesus is read during the liturgical celebrations. Palm Sunday begins Holy Week, which is the last week of Lent.

Although the blessing and distribution of palm branches was the tradition, not everyone in every location can get palms, and branches of other native trees are also used. Some people name the day after these substitute trees, as in Yew Sunday, or by the general term Branch Sunday. For me, the budding and blooming branches around Paradelle seem like a good substitute, and the colors of the blooming flowers – especially the multicolored crocuses – seem like all the colors of Easter from church vestments to the thing I would find in my childhood Easter basket.

Reading Updike on a Rainy Friday Night

I was dusting bookshelves today and as I went past my row of books by John Updike I had to pull a few off and look into them.

I really liked Updike’s stories and novels. My wife and I used to read the books together every summer for a number of years. I also admired Updike’s three pages per day writing requirement. He really worked at his writing.  It paid off. He had a 50+ year career and has 67 books listed on his Wikipedia bibliography that includes 21 novels, 18 short-story collections, 12 books of poetry, 4 children’s books, and 12 collections of non-fiction. Many of my favorite pieces of his fiction are found among his 186 short stories.

I wasn’t reading Updike in 1960. That was the year he was 28 (I was 7) and he published his second novel, Rabbit, Run.  The New York Times called the book a “shabby domestic tragedy,” but also “a notable triumph of intelligence and compassion.” I would read it during the summer 0f 1968 after I had read a book of his stories, Pigeon Feathers, and then his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair.

The stories especially appealed to me, since I saw myself as a budding short story writer and was reading Hemingway, Salinger, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and other story writers too. I would go on to read almost all the stories and novels in chronological order of their publication. I wanted to write little, perfect stories like his “A&P.” I was a high school boy and immediately identified with Updike’s boy working at the checkout counter in an A&P supermarket when three young pretty girls walk in wearing nothing but bathing suits. That little plot unfolds quickly and tragically.

In my freshman year of college as an English major, I was assigned to read his newest novel, Rabbit Redux.  a sequel to the first Rabbit book.

I gave her my copy of the sexy Couples novel when we were dating, and we both read Marry Me when it came out and we were a few years from being married ourselves.  Updike chronicles many marriages and many uncouplings, some based on his own life story.

Updike received two Pulitzer Prizes for two of the four Rabbit novels. There is also “Rabbit Remembered” a long story (or novella) that came later. Those tales chronicle Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, an ex- high-school basketball star who first deserts his wife and son and then explores sexuality, marriage, parenting and also the time he is passing through in America.

I heard an interview he did at the time of his fourth Rabbit novel, Rabbit at Rest, which chronicles the end of Harry’s life. It is a sad book about grandpa Harry in his Florida condo, still dealing with his son, Nelson, and his wife, Janice, and an 1989 America that is a post-Reagan time of debt, AIDS, and President Bush 41. It won him another Pulitzer Prize. What interests me in the interview and book is his own thoughts about death. (He died of lung cancer in January 2009.)

I found a video that has John’s son, David Updike, interviewed about being the child of a writer. David was (is?) a teacher and also a writer and I have enjoyed reading his work. I have his children’s books and his books of stories and they are very good. It certainly must have been more negative than positive to be the son of John Updike if you wanted to be a writer. I like in this video David’s decision that he would give up writing a piece of fiction if it meant hurting someone he cared about. I don’t think his father held that belief.

John Updike received much praise in his lifetime for his writing. He also was pretty strongly disliked by some of his fellow writers and by feminists. He was, like too many famous men I admire, not a very good husband or father. But I think even some of those who are not fans concede that his prose is beautiful, often poetic.

I came to John Updike’s poetry much later than the books and stories. I love reading poetry, and I like some of his poems, but I feel like his prose had more poetry in it than many of the poems. I have used a few of his poems on my poetry blog

I took this passage from Updike’s wonderful story “Pigeon Feathers” and broke the sentences into more “poetic” line breaks using his punctuation most of the time. This “found poem” is about what it means to be dead as seen by teenage David as he walks at night across his farm home to the outhouse and imagines a grave. As I said, his prose is so often poetic, that it is easy to hear the sentences as lines in a poem.

A long hole in the ground,
no wider than your body,
down which you are drawn
while the white faces above recede.

You try to reach them
but your arms are pinned.
Shovels pour dirt into your face.
There you will be forever,
in an upright position,
blind and silent,
and in time no one will remember you,
and you will never be called by any angel.

As strata of rock shift,
your fingers elongate,
and your teeth are distended sideways
in a great underground grimace
indistinguishable from a strip of chalk.

Mid-Week Moments

Last week, somehow, a post that I had drafted long ago “published itself” on the site. Some trick of technology. Or maybe a sign. Get this post finished.

The post is a shorter one than most here. It’s the kind of post that I sometimes use on a Friday night as the weekend is getting into gear. I had created another category here long ago called “Evening Thoughts” which I use when something hits me to write on a weekday. I suppose there is some crossover but the midweek posts will be intentionally on Wednesdays. Not every week, but the first will appear tonight and it’s that post that appeared very briefly online though unfinished and was caught and reported to me by my faithful reader and friend, Leon.

I also occasionally reread an old post and find errors or I have changed my mind about the topic. If I do a rewrite, I’ll make those into Mid-Week Moments. If you’re a new reader of Weekends in Paradelle, they will be new posts. If you’re one of the old faithful, you might recognize some and the really sharp readers will see the changes.

Feeling a Bit Pagan Today

There is a bit of the pagan in the air this spring Sunday.

The secular celebration of Easter is all from pagan traditions. You’re being a modern Anglo Saxon if you have that bunny and decorated eggs as part of this holiday weekend.

They worshipped Eostre who was their goddess of springtime. This was the time to celebrate the true return of the sun from a long winter. Not that the Sun had been gone entirely, but it did not hold the power that it has in the other three seasons. The Christian holiday of Easter and other religions used the spring equinox as a guide to their own holy days.

But how did we get a rabbit with eggs?

Ukrainian Easter Eggs from the exhibition “The Pysanka: A Symbol Of Hope,” at the Ukrainian Institute of America in New York. via CNN

Eostre saved a bird whose wings had frozen during the winter by turning it into a rabbit. That rabbit who had once been a bird retained its ability to lay eggs. Though never officially adapted by the church, the Easter Bunny was born.

Eggs had been a symbol of fertility for a much longer time than Christianity. Keep in mind that eggs from chickens and from birds natural come in many colors, so coloring them began as an imitation of nature.

Unlike today, eggs had once been much more scarce during the winter, so spring also meant the return of eggs to the diet. There are records of people giving each other decorated eggs at this time of year and as part of Easter celebrations that go back to the 11th century.

Time Flies

Photo by Anastasiya Vragova on Pexels.com

What is the most commonly used noun in the English language? I read that it is “time.”

Time is always on our minds. We try our best to control it, but we know that it advances so matter what we do or don’t do.

I can’t really remember what my concept of time was as a child. I know that I wasn’t as concerned about it as I am now in my 60s. Time didn’t move slower or faster but I think I remember thinking I had all the time I would ever need.

As an adult, I have even studied time, from quantum mechanics to time travel fiction. I know that we can’t slow down or speed up time. Well, I guess Einstein would say we can kind of do that if we can travel very, very fast. Albert did not actually say this (but it is often attributed to him) “When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.” It is true that time seems to slow down when we’re bored. It seems to speed up when we’re enjoying ourselves. And it seems to speed up when as you get older even if you’re not enjoying yourself.

Without getting into anything at a quantum level, I think we all agree that Time is relative.

Someone wrote a book about this feeling that time flies. It’s called Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation.