The Moon Tonight 11/12/2016

Waxing Gibbous 96%

I shot these photos with a Nikon Coolpix that I keep in my car. I paid $60 for it at Walmart a few years ago. I was pretty pleased with how these came out. If I could have moved around a bit better, I could probably have done more with them.

Solstice Moon

Pink Full Moon

The last full moon rose lovely pink. I wasn't home in time to catch it on the horizon, but a bit later I went out to try to capture a few shots of the orb that so fascinates me.

During this little misadventure I managed to bash myself in the face twice with camera. I forgot to tighten a doodad on my tripod. Then I couldn't walk back to the house and my husband had to rescue me.

It's become difficult to take good photos with my limited mobility. It's hard to find the best angle to get the capture when you are limited in where you can place the camera. At least I'm still trying, eh?

August 2 Moon with Sunflowers

May Moon

Moon Set, March 6, 2015

Waning Full Moon

Last Thursday night the moon rose like a fireball in behind me. It was bitterly cold and I shot a couple of photos through the back door in the garage.

The next morning, the Snow Moon hung high in the sky, visible even in the brighter hours of the day.

“The moon is a loyal companion. It never leaves. It’s always there, watching, steadfast, knowing us in our light and dark moments, changing forever just as we do. Every day it’s a different version of itself. Sometimes weak and wan, sometimes strong and full of light. The moon understands what it means to be human. Uncertain. Alone. Cratered by imperfections.” ― Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me

Blood moon

This morning there was a total eclipse of the full moon. We had thunderstorms last night and I fully expected a cloudy sky this morning, but when I hopped out of bed at 6:20 a.m., there were stars twinkling and the moon looking very vampirish.

I stood outside with the camera on a tripod to get these photos, in near total darkness. An owl hooted in the distance. Soon, from someplace close to me, a turkey began calling. Cawl cawl cawl. Very loud, and a little unnerving. Luna, hanging low in the sky, continued to darken with that reddish brown color.

The bear in the backyard some weeks ago came to mind so I did not venture far from the door. But the moon was beautiful, the air still warm but fallish. I could smell the rain-dampened earth and feel that blessings of a new day in a way that staying in the house seldom offers.

As the sky began to turn from black to blue, with the sun slowly rising behind me, ol' Apollo there slipping back into his place in the sky, I watched the colors on the trees begin to show. The rains last night made everything that much brighter, and the colors are changing fast.

A beautiful reminder of the spirit of the world.

Friday the 13th Honey Moon

This is actually the moon set on Saturday, June 14, but that doesn't sound as interesting as the title. I took these early as the moon was going down. Apparently it will be decades before there is another full moon on a Friday the 13th.

Saturn

Saturn

By Sharon Olds

 

 

He lay on the couch night after night,
mouth open, the darkness of the room
filling his mouth, and no one knew
my father was eating his children.  He seemed to
rest so quietly, vast body
inert on the sofa, big hand
fallen away from the glass.
What could be more passive than a man
passed out every night--and yet as he lay
on his back, snoring, our lives slowly
disappeared down the hole of his life.
My brother's arm went in up to the shoulder
and he bit it off, and sucked at the wound
as one sucks at the sockets of lobster.  He took
my brother's head between his lips
and snapped it like a cherry off the stem.  You would have seen
only a large, handsome man
heavily asleep, unconscious.  And yet
somewhere in his head his soil-colored eyes
were open, the circles of the whites glittering
as he crunched the torso of his child between his jaws,
crushed the bones like the soft shells of crabs
and the delicacies of the genitals
rolled back along his tongue.  In the nerves of his gums and
bowels he knew what he was doing and he could not
stop himself, like orgasm, his
boy's feet crackling like two raw fish
between his teeth.  This is what he wanted,
to take that life into his mouth
and show what a man could do--show his son
what a man's life was.

 

In honor of Women's History Month in the United States, I wanted to share with you one of my favorite poets.

 

I became acquainted with the work of Sharon Olds in the late 1980s. This poem was in her first poetry book, Satan Says.

 

Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco; she is about the same age as my mother. Olds received her Ph.D. in English from Columbia University.

 

She won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and has won many other awards for her work. While she has not yet passed into history, her work had a profound effect on me while I was an undergraduate at Hollins College. I went to hear her read at Roanoke College in the early 1990s.

 

I own many of her books and they are among my prized possessions, especially the autographed ones. She has 11 collections of poetry.

 

You can listen to her read a little and discuss a poem in an interview with The Guardian here. Search for her on youtube and you can hear her read other poems, too (though I could not find her reading Saturn). If you like poetry and are not familiar with Olds, I urge you to give her work a try.

 



February's Full Snow Moon

January Full Moon Set

I took these in mid-January as the sun was setting over the mountain in front of me, to the west.

 

The trees were loaded down with birds.

 

 

I was able to capture a few of them in flight.

 

 

They made a raucous greeting to the morning.

 

 

As the sun came out, I could see they were robins and starlings.

 

 

What a way to greet the dawn!

The Moon at Daybreak

We had a bit of cloud cover this morning, but the moon kept peeping through.

She beckoned me outside (where it was quite warm) so that I might take pictures.

Because we all know I love to take shots of the moon.

She is not quite full, but close, lacking only a day or so of being at her finest.

As it is, she looks a bit like a snappy middle-aged woman who is moving on to the farther side of the numeric aisle.

You know, that age between not-so-young and not-yet-old.

When beauty is still in the eye of the beholder.