Seattle Moonrise

Poem No. 171

This past week Substack Reads shared one of my poems, which was a very fun surprise. So quite a few of you are new subscribers! Hello, and welcome. 👋 I’m so glad you’re here.

As I mentioned in previous letters, I’m just coming to the end of the busiest part of my work year. So one more re-post and then (hopefully!) back to new poems. This week, a poem and post I first shared in January. It happens to be one of Petra Hernandez’s faves 😊:

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Sometimes a moment will install itself in the theater of my memory with a certain… something.

Not clarity exactly, nor intensity, but more like a quality Joan Didion referred to as a “shimmer around the edges.” Such moments don’t need to be particularly consequential. In fact, they tend not to be. They are often simple events whose personal meaning is only revealed to me later, by writing about them, usually in a poem.

Today’s poem explores one such shimmering moment:

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Seattle Moonrise

We rode the ferry together
and moved as one to the stern
to watch the moon rise
heavy and round above the city.

No one spoke for a long time,
because we were young and sure.

And since it seemed as though
anything at all could happen
in the oncoming years,
it felt, just then,
as if everything would.

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I like collecting these moments in poems — over time, they become a sort of emotional scrapbook or photo album.

And speaking of time: in a previous letter I shared a poem which had one word I spent nearly two years editing. This week’s poem is the polar opposite: it fell from my pen (in response to a February Poetry Adventure prompt) almost completely formed — an extremely rare thing for me — but only after the moment spent more than a decade as a quiet, persistently shimmering memory. Which I suppose is just a different way of saying this poem took a decade to write.

Please feel free to share this poem with anyone you think might enjoy it:

Thanks for reading,
~ A

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