(Supermoon July 13, 2022)
Last
week we woke up the kids just before midnight to go and see the moon
and
it was magical, the way their own little moon-faces lit up too,
how
huge and familiar the moon is, how when it was time to walk back
to
bed our son, three years old, calmly told the moon goodnight.
When
it’s daylight and he sees the moon in blue sky he points and laughs at it,
Silly
moon, go to sleep, moon, because he is learning how the world works
and,
even, some of the things outside of the world: the moon, the sun,
the
stars. Today his sister asked me what galaxy means
and
I tried to explain and, later, she asked Why was there darkness?
What
darkness? I asked. First there was darkness, she told me.
I was reading a story about God. She’s four.
We don’t really talk about God
in
our house but we do talk a lot about stories, and about darkness,
how
there is a time for darkness and a time for light. Yesterday you
successfully
convinced our son to go back to sleep for awhile
when
he woke up at dawn but his little body is ready for the day
as
soon as that gold seeps through the not-quite-impenetrable
black-out
curtains we installed in the kids’ room, hopeful
for
our own sleep. I never saw so many sunrises until I was his
mother.
And, too, I never thought much about moonrises until
last
week when even close to midnight I couldn’t find the moon.
I
scouted out the back garden, the front lawn, the neighbours’,
and
it was a block and a half away before I was far enough
from
houses and trees to see the immense thing, the supermoon,
so
low in the sky I almost missed it though I knew it was there.
It’s
been over two years of a pandemic and we want to find
wonderful,
big things to be excited about for our children.
The
news is full of fire and bullet holes and heartbreak.
Low
in my body but not to be missed is the new baby growing,
a
crescent of limbs kicking me. I walked alone with my belly
until
I found the moon and I texted you, Found it,
and
you chuckled. It’s ridiculous it took so long. I was grinning
too,
walking back with purpose: now we knew where the moon was
we
could justify waking the children up to see it, we would show them
this
one wonderful ridiculous thing. First there is darkness
but
then there is a light. Sometimes you can’t see it
even
when it should be obvious it is there, and massive,
but
it’s still there. If you can’t see it someone else can.
And
if you have the time it’s still probably a good idea
to keep looking for yourself.
Ruth Daniell is a teacher, editor, writer, and the author of The Brightest Thing (Caitlin Press, 2019). Her work has appeared in Watch Your Head: Writers and Artists Respond to the Climate Crisis (Coach House Press, 2020), Resistance: Righteous Rage in the Age of #Metoo (University of Regina Press, 2021) and Worth More Standing: Poets and Activists Pay Homage to Trees (Caitlin Press, 2022). She lives with her family in Kelowna, BC, on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the syilx/Okanagan people, where she is at work on her second collection of poetry.
