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Poetry in lunar motion
Caroline Burrows spends a month making poetic observations of the Moon
As a poet and a writer, I love the Moon and its associated vocabulary: words such as ‘moonset’, ‘celestial’ and ‘lunation’. But my mind struggles with its more scientific aspects: the Moon’s haphazard schedule; it only being called a quarter when half of it is visible; and the geometry of its rotation. To better my understanding, I combined science with poetry, writing a verse each night for a lunar month titled ‘Between New Moons’.
In the lengthening November nights, I’d check my Moon app and set out on late strolls up Bristol’s urban hills in the direction of its azimuth, that’s Moon-speak for bearing. I visualised it as a ship circumnavigating Earth, each night the planet having to rotate a bit extra to catch up. That explained why, from my fixed position, the Moon rose later each night.
One evening with a friend, I cycled to Troopers Hill, which provided an uninterrupted ecliptic path overhead and a panorama of city lights glittering below. We watched the Moon’s almost half-lit face play hide-and-seek behind clouds, now knowing first quarter was referencing the distance it had travelled on its orbit round our planet.
On nights when sightings weren’t possible, I explored the 17th-century map by Riccioli, enamoured by the plains he named as seas divided into good and bad weather.
The Sea of Clouds, the Sea of Rains
Swirled into an Ocean of Storms.
When Moon’s calm right-side ebbs and wanes,
What’s left works tempestuous forms.
The Moon revealed other ways science and literature have crossed paths. Throughout history, selenographers have named craters after astronomers, scientists and philosophers. There is one for Copernicus, whom I knew from Brecht’s play Life of Galileo. I’d studied Poetics by Aristotle, who is up there, too. I was overjoyed to see Haworth, but discovered it was for a Nobel chemist not the Brontë sisters. Nevertheless, for me, there was now a link to Wuthering Heights near the lunar south pole.
By week three, I was becoming obsessed. I’m a night owl, so the Moon appearing around 1am wasn’t a problem. In the garden I kept setting off a security light. Fortunately, my neighbours didn’t see me standing on a plastic chair, my binoculars pointed in their direction because the last quarter Moon was above their roof.
The week of the waning crescent coincided with ‘Museum of the Moon’, a 7m-diameter replica of the lunar globe installed as an inflatable artwork at Bath Abbey. I got up close to Grimaldi, a crater I’d peered at nights before. Back home, I caught up on Who Do You Think You Are?, with Judi Dench being told she was related to Tycho Brahe. I knew that name!
Tycho, the Moon’s southern crater,
Has impact rays in multitude.
To this one Earthly spectator,
They look like lines of longitude.
Then, with the lunar month ending, Bristol’s planetarium showed Apollo 11 and I watched the Moon landing. In astronomy, everything lining up like that would be called a syzygy. In literary terms, it was poetic.
Caroline Burrows is a professional poet and writer based in Bristol, who’s been featured on BBC Radio 4.
Read more of her ‘Between New Moons’ verses on social media: @VerseCycle