Meanwhile the Moon is Missing
My six-year-old grandson, Sam, has run off with the moon again,
small, white plastic ball, cratered and lit from within that perches
perpetually full on the delicate fingertips of a white plastic hand
on my bookcase’s top shelf—Betty Adcock to A. Van Jordan,
Dickinson halfway between. The shelf is tall and so is Sam,
so the moon is within his grasp which is a metaphor I embrace
as in shoot for the moon! and the cow jumped over and one small step.
His fingertips are hungry for texture, so he rubs the cratered surface
the way phrenologists explored the size and shape of a cranium
to discern character and mental abilities. Tell me about yourself, Moon
his eager fingers seem to say before he puts it down, somewhere
in the house, I suppose, before time to go, but taking with him,
I hope, the delight and wonder of holding the moon in his hands.
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Daye Phillippo taught English at Purdue University and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Literary Mama, Shenandoah, Presence, Cider Press Review, The Windhover, and many others. She lives and writes in rural Indiana. Her debut collection of poems, Thunderhead, was published by Slant in 2020.
