Poem: Contemplating the Moon in My 77th Year

On this day of the March Full Moon, Maria's poem "Contemplating the Moon in My 77th Year," from When the Stars Were Still Visible. 

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.

---

Maria Mazziotti Gillan's newest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (2021). Other recent publications are the poetry and photography collection, Paterson Light and Shadow, and the poetry collections What Blooms in Winter and The Girls in the Chartreuse Jackets, a pairing of her poems with her paintings.
Maria's artist website is MariaMazziottiGillan.com and her poetry website is MariaGillan.com.