Harvest Moon 2022

 

The moon, like a flower in heaven's bower, with silent delight sits and smiles on the night.

                                                                                         William Blake

I won't see the Harvest Moon this weekend. North Georgia will be shrouded in the fog and rain of a lingering front and Gulf system that may be in the forecast well into next week. That means my experience of this year's event relies on viewing a waxing gibbous moon tonight and tomorrow bolstered by memory and imagination. For many years I was fortunate to witness September's full moon emerge from the sea. It was always a sublime event powered by the realization that you were a witness to a sensory immersion experienced by coastal inhabitants for tens of housands of years. The simplicity always amazed me. Here was a man, a strip of sand, a plain of water, all under a dome of sky and caressed by the touch of wind and the sound of surf. Add the rising moon and expect the surreal. The experience was so powerful even when friends were along the conversations almost always stopped in homage when the first moon sliver appeared.

Lowcountry moonrise, McQueens Island, Savannah, Georgia, 1951

“. . . Her eyes, he says, are stars at dusk,

Her mouth as sweet as red-rose-musk;

And when she dances his young heart swells

With flutes and viols and silver bells;

His brain is dizzy, his senses swim,

When she slants her ragtime eyes at him.

Moonlight shadows, he bids her see,

Move no more silently than she.

It was this way, he says, she came,

Into his cold heart, bearing flame.

And now that his heart is all on fire

Will she refuse his heart's desire? . . .”

When the harvest moon is climbing high this weeknd, go outside. Take a friend or someone you love.

Get lost in it.





Sources

Photos and Illustrations:
National Park Service, Fort Pulaski National Monument Handbook, 1954

Text:
intro quotation, William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience, originally published in 1789.
poem excerpt, Conrad Aiken, "Turns and Movies: VI," Violet Moore and Bert Moore