After a Japanese Festival

_____“and so one should know how to address the moon.”
_____–Czeslaw Milosz

I went to the city officials for a permit,
but the police came to check us out anyway.
We gathered in a deep park darkness,
my grad students, their mates, children,
even one mother, to share moon poems, lore,
songs around a bonfire to honor
a ritual practiced in Japan. We sang
the childhood song, “I see the moon
and the moon sees me,” made the mother cry,
she orphaned young, She had almost forgotten
how her father held her, sang this song to her.
Nearby stood my huge and bulky
Dobsonian telescope with its big mirror
encased in a sturdy cardboard tube,
developed by a priest to provide
the best sky watching for those
of meager means as well as those
wedded to poverty by choice.
We saw the moon’s sun-washed side
with its pockmarks and gray dust.
It was a beautiful night to gather
under heaven’s wonders and recite
and sing together of the many,
many bright things we had almost
forgotten, barely understand and
rarely think to celebrate.

Carol Hamilton taught 2^nd grade through graduate school in Connecticut, Indiana, and Oklahoma, was a medical translator and storyteller. She was Poet Laureate of Oklahoma and has published and received various awards for 19 books and chapbooks of poetry, children’s novels, and legends.