Buck Moon

There's a full moon tonight, the fifth of July. It's known as the Buck Moon, named after the new antlers that emerge from a buck's forehead around this time of the year. (It is also called Thunder Moon, Hay Moon, and Wort Moon and if, like me, you didn't know that each full moon of the year has a particular name this will enlighten you this National Geographic article https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/2019/02/full-moon-names-explained

Here is a poem about dreaming of being a full moon. It's by Alice Oswald - one of the few poets I have in toto. (the others? Auden of course, and W S Graham, and Eliot and a few more). 

Full Moon

Good God! 

What did I dream last night? 

I dreamt I was the moon. 

I woke and found myself still asleep. 

It was like this: my face misted up from inside 

And I came and went at will through a little peephole. 

I had no voice, no mouth, nothing to express my trouble, 

except my shadows leaning downhill, not quite parallel. 

Something needs to be said to describe my moonlight. 

Almost frost but softer, almost ash but wholer. 

Made almost of water, which has strictly speaking 

No feature, but a kind of counter-light, call it insight. 

Like in woods, when they jostle their hooded shapes, 

Their heads congealed together, having murdered each other, 

There are moon-beings, sound-beings, such as deer and half-deer 

Passing through there, whose eyes can pierce through things. 

I was like that: visible invisible visible invisible. 

There's no material as variable as moonlight. 

I was climbing, clinging to the underneath of my bones, thinking: 

Good God! Who have I been last night?





Copyright Alice Oswald / Fabe and Faber