ManicDDaily

Why I often get up at 5 (Or a Little Before)

No one can expect anything from you
at this hour. 

Maybe there are things you should
be doing, but, hey—it’s 5
in the morning!

You could even make dinner
(you know, in advance),
but no one will think to say
why didn’t you make dinner? 

You could do office work, and those times
when you give in, smugness coats
each email like
an underscore.

You do at last make yourself budge from the blanket
you save for these dawn hours in a small not-totally-freezing room,
and find that the morning moon
is in a completely different quadrant of the sky
than seems the norm.  Seriously!
It’s veered way over
to the South.  (Definitely, South.)  But how
does that happen? 

You could look it up.  

Looking it up is the type of thing many people (i.e. your husband)
would do, but it’s still only 6:09 and he’s asleep,
while you are not even going to let yourself
feel embarrassed
by your lack of intellectual curiosity.

(Okay, okay:  so, the reason that the moon changes position in the sky
is that the moon’s orbit around the Earth
is approximately 5.1 degrees offset from the Earth’s orbit around the Sun,
which causes moonrise and moonset to vary to the North or South by as much
as 28.6 degrees.)

Are you happy now? 

Yes. 

******************************************

The moon, in fact, set way to the South today, and was full, or almost full.  I did not get a photo of it though, so here’s a pic from my children’s books, The Road I Like.  (The pic doesn’t really suit the poem, as this poet is, thankfully, no longer a commuter!)

Have a good day.  (And check out The Road I Like!)  (Also, the moon!)

This entry was posted on April 18, 2022 at 6:09 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: #napowrimo, April Poetry Month, Karin Gustafson poetry, The MOON!