Daun's Birthday, January 19th

So she'd be 60 today. Thinking of her, as always
Googling My Sister


She'd be glad her Welty essay
comes up first, that students
who never knew her continued her
her stem cell donor work, and a child
prays a good-night prayer for her
and her daughter each night,
though their website notes
that my sister has since died.


The first year, I found
only one hit, but it remains
in the top ten. She'd be glad.
Her name on a petition
for responsible journalism.




If you'd like to read by tributes by some of her friends (Peggy Anderson, Sandy Anderson, Paul Beauvais, Jeff Bineham, Marc Crail, Linda Define, Bruce Hyde, Sara (Ampe) Schlorf, Katie Schneider-Bryan, Bill Tuttle, and Mark Wolters), they are here and linked on a webpage about her here.

Another poem, "Elegy for My Sister" is here.

Nearly Full Moon, January 7, 2012

It's been a glorious day in Northeast Ohio: Forty-Six degrees and sunny. And as the sun was going down on our 5:00 p.m. walk, the nearly full moon was rising and reminding me of all the moon poems I have ever read and written. Back in the mid- 1970s, I wrote my master's thesis on Plath's moon imagery, and the more thesis I wrote, the more poems I wrote.


In celebration of the moon and the 1970's (remember the Bicentennial?) I post two of my previously published poems, "I Witness the Lunar Eclipse of 1982 and Write My Last Moon Poem" and "More Moon Poems."




I WITNESS THE LUNAR ECLIPSE OF 1982 AND WRITE MY LAST MOON POEM


It is full, full as your throat the moment before
telling something big for the first time,
that weighted with its own import, too.
For a week it's been one huge
melon of a moon, prettiest since the U.S. Bicentennial

That Fourth of July, we watched
two hundred years' worth of fireworks, cooed
to the baby, "Ooo!
What a good one!"
after each mum of light.  Once in the silence
she cooed back, "Look, Grandma!  Isn't it a good one?"
"Oh, Danielle, that's the moon!"
"Yeah, isn't it a good one?"

Isn't it a good one?

(First published in Twenty-four Poets and Just One Moon. Copyright Diane Kendig 1989).



MORE MOON POEMS

                                Are all the poems about the moon written? Oh, no,
                        there is still much to say about the moon.--Artur Lundkvist


New Moon at Sunset

The sky reflects the pink of a shirt worn
and washed for centuries, like this moon,
worn and watched, now tugged,
a scimitar caught on the sleeve.
.        Quarter Moon, What Roethke Meant

Two nights we straining the sky
and catch the moon in a tree’s sieve:
citrus zest, sickled—peel
without pith, seed, flesh, stem—
“all shining, a scattering.”
       Harvest Half

Early on, came on,
orange and now lies in the lid:
a children’s bright vitamin
some dark child bites into.
                                                                                    Moon Viewing
                                                                       
                                                                        In Japan, she saw the full moon
                                                                        This way: a mirror above a pool below
                                                                        The moon: moon on moon on moon.

The Chrysanthemum Moon, Waning

The ninth moon
pours butter that settles
in night’s cast iron bottom
                New Moon After Sunset

      Just after: indigo, pink
      and tangerine vie
      for the light of it
      while the moon,
      thin as a ribbon edge, rises.
Coda: On the Moon’s Constancy
Like the sun, it rises
And sets, but makes the bed
Oftener and with different sheets each time.

(First published in Windsor Review. Copyright Diane Kendig 1995)