The Night's Magician: Poems about the Moon

The Night's Magician: Poems about the Moon is an anthology with poems about the by 80 poets.

Today, the Moon will be at last quarter, and the moon will also be at apogee, its farthest point from Earth for this month. We offer you Maria's poem from the anthology:

Contemplating the Moon in My 77th Year

As a girl, I was fascinated by the moon,
thought it was amazing in the dark Paterson sky.
I wrote hundreds of haiku about it.
I always saw it as some reflection of my longing
to live in a place far removed from my ordinary life.

In 1969, in married student housing at Rutgers,
I watched with my two young children,
as Neil Armstrong on the Apollo 11 mission
walked on the moon. It seemed
unbelievable that these figures could be walking
on that cratered surface.

Today, more than fifty years later, I read
that the moon is drifting away from the earth.
Did you know that the dark side of the moon is a myth?

Now, the moon has become a symbol for what is left
of my life, all those craters that trip us up so often,
so we’re unable to walk without falling,
like the other day, when I waited for almost an hour
for someone to pick me up off the porch where I had fallen.

I must accept that the landscape of old age is like the surface
of the moon. It has so many places to fall.
As a girl, I made up stories about its cratered surface,
the faces I imagined lived in it.
I watched those astronauts on the moon, weightless in their space suits.
What did I know? I thought life would be easy
and I would walk across it sure and strong;
instead now this shuffling gait.
I'd like to be weightless
like the men in their space suits.
No more broken bones.
No more pitfalls. No more grief.

Moon, each day, you wear a different face.
I still imagine you speak to me.
And you do, but the words I hear
cannot save me; it is your beauty,
as you skim across the night sky,
that lifts me up.

Praise for The Night’s Magician

"In this anthology of poems, 80 gifted contributors from Baltimore to Bucharest reacquaint us with the luminous, numinous moon—and what a delightful meeting it is! As I sit listening to Holst’s The Planets, feasting my eyes on this printed panorama of moonstruck mindscapes, the irony of this strange Black Moon month when our astral partner hides from our view is impressed upon me as I write, and I am reminded how much I miss her."  — Michael A. Flannery

"After all, haven’t we all shared the moon? Hasn’t it accompanied us all, through everything?" — Sena Jeter Naslund


"This brilliant collection is a demonstration of the universality of the poet’s gaze at the moon. Along with the human heart, the moon is perhaps the most suited for consideration by the poet—a pool and a mirror, our closest yet unreachable neighbor. Sharing their visions with us the poets in The Night’s Magician demonstrate the universality of the moon, our shared neighbor and mirror to us all."  — Carlos Dews

"If you are old enough to remember 1953, Dean Martin crooning When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore, you will fall in love all over again when your eyes feast on poems in The Night’s Magician. Some poems explore the moon’s relation to earth and create hymns to our life on this planet. Other lush poems look closely at the natural world and the moon’s physical cycles to see how they each reflect an individual life. Several poets depict its gravitational pull that produces ocean tide, body tide and the slight lengthening of the day. Others delve into the moon’s mysterious indifference, what it coolly withholds, a puzzle that can’t be solved, that prompts dogs to bay their hearts out."  — Vivian Shipley

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Maria Mazziotti Gillan's most recent books are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow  and the poetry collection, What Blooms in Winter . Her collection of poems along with some of her paintings is The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets . Maria's official website is MariaGillan.com.

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