Swear Not by the Moon, th’ Inconstant Moon
Rent from DeepDyve- Swear Not by the Moon, th’ Inconstant Moon
Swear Not by the Moon, th’ Inconstant Moon
William Shakespeare
Ten when the moon stopped being the moon, all that kicking up dust eons old seemed so irreverent. Though I didn’t know that word,
I knew respect was due. More than those ghostly, herky-jerky figures leaping, danseurs in a low-budget ballet, could offer.
Now the moon’s just reflected light, the dull story of abandoned equipment and a flag,
American, built to give the illusion of a wind not there, a fluttering purely show.
Maybe to know it’s there is enough. As a boy, though, to lose the moon was more disturbing than any gains I could imagine.
Not knowing the moon had let us believe we were watched over. Too much knowing has left us older, on our own. [End Page 17]
George Looney’s books include Structures the Wind Sings Through: A Poem, Monks Beginning to Waltz, A Short Bestiary of Love and Madness, Open Between Us, The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels (which won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize), Attendant Ghosts, Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh (which won the Bluestem Award), and the novella Hymn of Ash (which won the Elixir Press Fiction Chapbook Award). He is the founder of the bfa in Creative Writing program at Penn State-Erie, editor in chief of the international literary journal Lake Effect, translation editor of Mid-American Review, and codirector of the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival.
