New Moon

Resetting the world and the poetry of W.B. Yeats

Photo by Andre Moura

A friend has family in Gaza. Every day she is frightened and weary, she says. I know a grade school teacher who worries about a student who has threatened to hurt herself. There’s a mother in Maine who is searching for her missing son, who fled a psychiatric hospital and disappeared into the nearby woods. It’s been weeks.

When has the world not been painful, hopeless? This is not a call to blindly accept heartache. Suffering is part of life, yes. But no one would deny the state of the world right now. Read the news. We are upside down. At times it appears a relentless river of human hurt and intolerance.

This morning, I awoke to a New Moon. It rose in my sky at just after 7 a.m., a nearly invisible sliver in a dawn-blue sky. A New Moon, for those who follow the celestial, symbolizes renewal, a time to reflect, to pause. I stood under the magnolia tree in the yard and could sense the turning of a page, the coming reset. This was just as the New Moon was rising. Coincidence, maybe. I suggest it wasn’t. It seemed the New Moon and my awakening were destined to be coupled. There was newness all around. Even hope, dare I say. How did that manifest? Was it the Moon’s doing? How could it be? In Hindu culture, the New Moon is known as Amavasya—“moon is not visible”—and is considered to be a day of unusually great power where good and evil is pondered, like many of us are doing every day in these times.

I spend a good deal of time watching the Moon. Its phases fascinate me. Its waxing, the waning, its fullness. The Super Moon. The Blue Moon. The Man in the Moon. Its metamorphosis intrigues. It carries mystery. But it also carries hope. We wish on a star, but we gaze at the moon, anticipating inspiration, love, solace, the the undeniable faith in something better.

In these difficult times—Yeats’ “Second Coming” reminds me of the apocalyptic nature of humanity. The poet wrote it at a particularly horrific time in our world, WWI. And since then, the poem arises again and again when we are out of balance—the Vietnam War, the pandemic, and now.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world

Few would claim the poem is a hopeful one. Yet, for one reason or another, every generation feels the quake of doom, just as Yeats did a century ago. And yes, things fall apart, over and over again, yet the “beast,” as Yeats reminds us, never quite reaches Bethlehem.

Still there in the sky is the moon, the New Moon. And there is Yeats again. This time his poem “The Sorrow of Love,” evoking the moon’s image, offering verse about being free of the world’s troubles and how love should save us.

The brawling of a sparrow in the eaves

The brilliant moon and all the milky sky

And all that famous harmony of leaves

Had blotted out man's image and his cry.

In the coming days, I’ll watch the moon grow to a crescent, then a half-moon, and blossom to its fullest, and let it pull at my heart.