Snow Moon

    Tomorrow, February 19, many of our skies will be lit up by a full moon (snow). I'm featuring a poem today by New Englander poet, James Russell Lowell, because his words conjure up instantly a picture in my head of me sitting alone, looking up into a starry sky, dominated by a full moon.

Moonlight

The moon shines white and silent

On the mist, which, like a tide

Of some enchanted ocean

Over the wide marsh doth glide

Spreading its ghost-like billows

Silently far and wide

A vague and starry magic

Make all things mysteries

And lures the earth's dumb spirit

Up to the longing skies

I seem to hear dim whispers

And tremulous replies

The fireflies over the meadow

In pulses come and go

The elm-tree's heavy shadow

Weighs on the grass below

And faintly from the distance

The dreaming cock doth crow

All things look strange and mystic

The very bushes swell

And take wild shapes and motions

As if beneath a spell

They seem not the same lilacs

From childhood known so well

The snow of deepest silence

Over everything doth fall

So beautiful and quiet

And yet  so like a pall

As if all life were ended

And rest were come to all

O wild and wondrous midnight

There is a might in thee

To make the charmed body

Almost like spirit be

And give it some faint glimpses

Of immortality

James Russell Lowell 1819-1891