Poets are our night lights
Night Light
The moon is not green cheese.
It is china and stands in this room.
It has a ten-watt bulb and a motto:
Made in Japan.
Whey-faced, doll-faced,
it’s closed as a tooth
and cold as the dead are cold
till I touch the switch.
Then the moon performs
its one trick:
it turns into a banana.
It warms its subjects,
it draws us into light,
just as I knew it would
when I gave ten dollars
to the pale clerk
in the store that sold
everything.
She asked, did I have a car?
She shrouded the moon in tissue
and laid it to rest in a box.
The box did not say moon.
It said This side up.
I tucked the moon into my basket
and bicycled into the world.
By the light of the sun
I could not see the moon
under my sack of apples,
moon under slab of salmon
moon under clean laundry,
under milk its sister
and bread its brother,
moon under meat.
Now supper is eaten.
Now laundry is folded away.
I shake out the old comforters.
My nine cats find their places
and go on dreaming where they left off.
My son snuggles under the heap.
His father loses his way in a book.
It is time to turn on the moon.
It is time to live by a different light.
-Nancy Willard
It’s a good question, perhaps: by what light are we living?
