Garlic pokes up green
Mud ruts deepen to puddles
Wide sky raining light.
Big Moon
There’s a big moon coming tonight, a 20 year moon, a super perigee moon. From the NASA website:
“Full Moons vary in size because of the oval shape of the Moon’s orbit. It is an ellipse with one side (perigee) about 50,000 km closer to Earth than the other (apogee). Nearby perigee moons are about 14% bigger and 30% brighter than lesser moons that occur on the apogee side of the Moon’s orbit.
Above: Perigee moons are as much as 14% wider and 30% brighter than lesser full Moons. [video]
“The full Moon of March 19th occurs less than one hour away from perigee–a near-perfect coincidence1that happens only 18 years or so.”
I drive east when I drive home from work, so I often see the moon rising, huge and yellow shining through the trees on the horizon. Though I’ve always noticed how big the rising moon looks, with objects on the horizon as a size reference, I’ve never fully understood why, and assumed I could look up the answer some day. But the NASA website goes on to say, “The best time to look is when the Moon is near the horizon. That is when illusion mixes with reality to produce a truly stunning view. For reasons not fully understood by astronomers or psychologists, low-hanging Moons look unnaturally large when they beam through trees, buildings and other foreground objects.”
Regardless of whatever information I have in my mind, the moon tonight is bound to be beautiful. And it’s Sam’s birthday, so I can’t help but think this big moon is here today to say, “Happy 25th Birthday, Sam!”
Haiku LXXI
Bright ice March morning
Yesterday’s rain frozen still
Sun tracking higher.
Haiku LXI
Trees know winter’s bone
Pace and character of snow
Quickening of light.
Haiku LIX
Haiku LVII
Shadows on hard snow
Brook beginning to open
Ice lacing water.
NaHaiWriMo
NaHaiWriMo – National Haiku Writers Month — the shortest month of the year, for the shortest form of poetry. I learned this from A Woodland Rose, who is writing a haiku every day in February. A Woodland Rose and I connected through my Twin Sistah (no, I don’t have a twin, this is a friend and colleague who shares the same birthday as me and who has such an enthusiastic embrace of life and the path of feminist justice that she calls her colleagues in the movement to end violence against women, the movement for greater peace and centered awareness in the world, “sistahs!”, thus we are Twin Sistahs) who directed A Woodland Rose to my blog. So we’re BloHaiSis’s, or Blogging Haiku Sistahs. Today’s NaHaiWriMo entry:
Early grey softens
Ice cushioning running feet
Spinning globe turns south.
Haiku LII
Dawn outlined in white
Each twig limb branch trunk needle
Sticky wet overcoat.
Monday Morning
It’s -12 degrees. The dawn is washing gray over the black and white, snow and ice world. I’m getting ready to go to work, not carrying my grandson around while I make my morning coffee, then cradling him in my bent-knee lap so he can move his head and arms and legs around, whirling the world into view, into his mind, into his churn of newness and marvel and plain figuring-it-all-out. Like most babies, he moves his head to look at light and lifts his face to let the morning through the window fill his eyes. I look out the window most mornings myself, I get up and raise the shades and see what’s what. Today I see frigid air and snow still clumped on the miniature blue spruce. It’s too cold to make the long walk out to the paper tube, long because the path across the front yard isn’t shoveled and getting to the paper means walking out the driveway, across the road in front of the house, down the road to the side of the house. There’s a five foot wall of plowed snow between the house and the newspaper. I’ll get the news soon enough today. I’m going to work, and there’s no baby in my lap.
Haiku XXXXV
Snow again last night
House full of morning sunshine
Dig out dig under.
Grace Mattern 