Mass of the Moon Eclipse

Lunar Eclipse, photo by Howard Brannen

The Lunar Eclipse going on today is extraordinary, and I just had to re-post this beautiful poem.  This is a cosmic event that could also be known as a Rite of Passage for many.  Denise Levertov imagined the Eclipse as not a phenonomena, but a Mass, a celestial event that moves us all in its orbit into the sacred. Blessed be.

MASS OF THE MOON ECLIPSE

Not more slowly than frayed

human attention can bear, but slow

enough to be stately, deliberate, a ritual

we can't be sure will indeed move

from death into resurrection.

As the bright silver inch by inch 

is diminished, options vanish,

life's allurements. The last silver

lies face down, back hunched, a husk.

But then, obscured, the whole sphere can be seen

to glow from behind its barrier shadow:  bronze,

unquenchable, blood-light.  And slowly,

more slowly than desolation overcame, overtook

the light, the light

is restored, outspread in a cloudless pasture of

spring darkness where firefly planes

fuss to and fro, and humans

turn off their brief attention

in secret relief.  No matter:  the rite

contains its power, whether or not

our witness rises toward it;

grandeur plays out the implacable drama

without even flicking aside our trivial

absence, the impatience with which we

fail to respond.

                And yet

we are spoken to, and sometimes 

we do stop, do, do give ourselves leave

to listen, to watch.  The moon,

the moon we do after all

love, is dying, are we to live

on a world without moon?  We swallow

a sour terror.  Then

that coppery sphere, no-moon become once more

full-moon, visible in absence.

And still without haste, silver

increment by silver

increment, the familiar, desired,

disregarded brilliance

is given again,

given and given.

Denise Levertov, "Mass of the Moon Eclipse"

from This Great Unknowing:  Last Poems, 

1999, New Directions Press