Birch Moon

Chris Ellery

January 29, 2023

Being a water sign (Cancer), I’m ruled 

(they say) by the moon. Maybe that’s true, 

but I can’t tell you the phase when my father died 

or when each of my children was born.

The first time I kissed my wife—I do remember that. 

The moon was full, bright and round, 

a harvest moon, streaming 

through the windshield of my old Pontiac. 

Here in America, we think of the moon as feminine—

Selene or Diana or Luna. We shoot rockets at it 

to make our point, and manly poets drink 

their inspiration in the milky light. 

It turns out the word “moon” in Arabic 

is grammatically masculine.

His light is borrowed from the feminine sun.

That’s how it always was in my marriage.

Long ago I worked a few days on a dig 

near Raqqa, Syria. We unearthed the first skull  

as a sliver of moon was rising. Was it waxing 

or waning? At the time it didn’t seem important, 

like so many things that happen under the horns of the bull. 

As we brushed away dirt from the skeletons,

we couldn’t have known that one day that place 

would become the untranquil base of the ISIS caliphate.

The year I was there I lived alone and talked every night

to the moon as it passed on the way to my home. 

Soon I grew the heart of the werewolf 

and the mind of triple-formed Hecate. 

These many years later, 

I sometimes still get a little loony 

thinking of an old car and a first kiss, of rockets 

and lunar modules and a man’s giant leap to the dust, 

of dusky, bearded men who dug the naked bones with me 

in the desert, and of joy on the face of a skull 

for seeing the moon again. 

Then I go outside and listen to the moon come rising. 

As I do this January evening, 

with the year’s first moon, birch moon, waxing,

easing through the night (he or she) along the silver river, 

whispering of magic—birth, time, kinship, strife, love, honor.

Chris Ellery is the author of Elder Tree (Lamar University Literary Press, 2016), a collection of poems based on the Celtic tree calendar. His poems have appeared recently in the anthologies A Fire to Light our Tongues, The Power of the Pause, and Lone Star Poetry.