Feet on the Ground, Eyes on the Moon

Coming to Ground #20

A screenshot from the NASA timelapse video of the Lunar Eclipse, linked at the bottom of the page.

Dearest Fellow Earthlings,

Here we all are, together on a small planet in a vast universe. Last night, the Full Sugaring Moon passed through our collective shadow and was bathed for a time in the blood-like color of Earthlight.

Did you go out to see the Lunar Eclipse? Being up all night wasn’t something I could do, though I briefly considered setting an alarm to get up during the totality, I truly needed to sleep, and I did. I awoke early this morning to bright moonlight and a text message from our youngest who is far away from us, to let us know they were witnessing it. It warmed my heart as I remembered nights when we all bundled up in the wee hours to go out and see that wonder together as a young family.

Even though I didn’t see last night’s lunar eclipse with my own eyes, I hold the image of others that I’ve witnessed. The thought of people throughout the world making time to see a full or partial eclipse in the nighttime, somehow stirs hope. And maybe that hope rises out of the desire for people to be touched by their own incredible, precious smallness and the finite reality of our collective existence.

May we be filled with the wonder of being alive in all this vastness.

I wrote the following poem after a Lunar Eclipse in 2018.

Lunar Eclipse

Moments when bodies line up perfectly: Sun Earth Moon
in syzygy, we see the shape of our own roundness moving
over that dry and cratered surface, the sun at our back;

a reminder that our planet, carries
all of its varied passengers as it spins in vastness,
dances on its track around the light.

During an eclipse, the full Moon dims,
reddening in Earthlight, while Earth’s shade
creeps slowly over its bright face.

We call this a “blood moon.” Some say it foretells
death or some other kind of grief,
but we might see, in Earth’s ruddy shadow,

a firm coalescence of dirt and stone and breath,
teeming with stems and bones and blood,
the evidence of our substantiality;

confirmation that we are
here within our flesh, upon the ground,
simultaneously immense and strangely small.

I recall the first lunar eclipse I witnessed,
lying on a blanket with a few good friends
late at night on the wide lawn of a closed botanical garden.

We drank our wine and looked up, wide-eyed,
as the brilliant light of the moon diminished
in shadow and the stars grew even brighter.

No one saw us climb the fence, but we were there,
gathered, young and sprawled on the ground, alive
on the green and growing grass,

a mid-summer chorus of frogs
sang all around us;
our lively whispers and laughter

ascended and spread in waves
into the warm night air
in ever widening circles.

(Note: a version of this poem was originally published in “The Ibis Head Review”, June 2018. That publication is no longer in circulation.)

NASA’s Time-lapse video of the Lunar Eclipse, March 13-14, 2025 (linked below)

From NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio, 2025; timelapse video

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