One summer long, walking a friend’s three-year-old,
with her stroller and self along the mountainside,
in our hush we discovered it, she and I. Here,
navigating treetops in a dark sea sky: this lucid moon.
It was so ours. Stretching her whole body forward,
her own light flexed upward, she cries, “Moon!
Want it! Want it” Her fingers extend and close,
extend and close. Extend and close. Yet it slips through.
My adult heart poised in one breath, the night was still,
trees sipping silence and moon-sap. And, she, separated
by a barrier of air, becomes quiet. I feel, thirty years long with
wax and wane, across ills we’re heir to, the echoing sea.
– Christopher J. Ash