waxing gibbous growing to the full moon
cold days and nights, snowy white ground,
white above, also cold, frozen places,
me, thankful to be inside where I
can read, write, sip spring tea, dream.
waxing gibbous, approaching Full Moon
Inspired by reading winter haiku, drinking a tisane of spring flowers and leaves, on a cold night with the almost Full Moon outside my window.
midwinter moon
a temple revealed
high in the heavens
~ Basho
Before daybreak these mornings, two bright objects
of nighttime, Moon and Venus, are East.
Earthshine’s glow lights the Moon’s dark side
with this twice-reflected sunlight and Earth appears
a half-lighted landscape in the lunar sky.
This NASA photograph from Apollo 11 shows the partly-illuminated Earth rising over the lunar horizon. The Earth is approximately 400,000 km away.
a thinning crescent as it slowly sweeps
past four bright morning planets – first Jupiter
then Mars, Saturn and Mercury, the crescent
points at them this morning of equinox.
Golden Saturn invisible to me – but there.
Not supernatural, not a noun, but things
cut off from view by something interposing.
Today, Moon occults Mars in its sweep
through the zodiac, near Jupiter, below Saturn.
Still, mystical, magical, phenomena to Earthly me.
Like the Moon’s oblong circling of us,
we move in our eccentric crisscrossing orbits
around each other and some unseen centerpoint.
Tonight at apogee, distant in cold space.
If there’s a future, there’s also perigee.
Perigee is when the Moon is at its closest point to Earth in its orbit, while apogee is when it is at its most distant. Like everything else in nature, the Moon’s orbit is always in flux and its shape and its orientation relative to the Earth and the Sun change all the time.
Here, under the trees, there’s no sunlight,
only shade from moonlight which invites shades –
ghosts from Hades, if stories are true.
I have come here to meet one
who can tell me what to expect.
Writing the Day 