. . . So people can't sleep,
So they go out where elms and oak trees keep
A kneeling vigil, in a religious hush.
The harvest moon has come! . . .

Excerpt from “Harvest Moon,” Ted Hughes

We go out before the rain starts. It threatens over the river in dark puffy clouds. I have woken to revising my newest poem. As soon as I am crossing the meadow, it’s on my mind and I know it needs something, and then it comes: the title. It needs a new title. And a few more tweaks I will make after returning home. Under the canopy of trees by the brook, I find mushrooms, lit like lamps near the ground in the darkening light. It’s not raining yet, but it will. The purple asters are lasting and bright. Suzi dips in the brook. We stop at the wetlands that run from our brook and the white tailed deer make a noisy loud dash through the mud and the muck, their hooves sucking and splashing in great, dramatic leaps, and Charlie just listens, awestruck and dumbstruck - he is not willing to chase them through this! It starts to rain and I enjoy getting wet while I walk through the dark woods for a good long ramble. Then I return, and work a bit on my poem and get caught up on e-mails and business. I must choose what I will read for my poetry reading at Lily Poetry Salon in Needham tomorrow night, among other things. I am glad that a reader writes me and asks for the prompt I offered to send out last night, so I send it to her. Tonight I talk to one of my Wednesday morning writers, and she says how powerful the prompt was for her in our session. Tonight, as I sit in my room at my desk overlooking the meadow, in the purple sky after sunset, I see the bright almost full Harvest moon shining behind the tops of the pines and watch it rise up. Perhaps, as Ted Hughes suggests in his poem, it will keep us all from sleeping well tonight – and for a few nights to come.

“Nature is particularly cooperative in giving us full-looking moons near the horizon after sunset, for several evenings in a row, around the time of the Harvest Moon.”

“Here in the Northern Hemisphere, we call the full moon closest to the autumn equinox the Harvest Moon. Depending on your time zone, 2019’s autumn equinox for the Northern Hemisphere comes on September 22 or 23. And the September full moon comes on the night of Friday, September 13, for the most of North America, and on September 14 for much of the rest of the world. Thus, for the Northern Hemisphere, this upcoming full moon – the full moon closest to our autumn equinox – is our Harvest Moon.”

~ https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/harvest-moon-2, Posted by Deborah Byrd in ASTRONOMY ESSENTIALS | September 11, 2019