Eight hundred and four full moons
I do not – cannot – quite recall
How many full moons
I actually have or haven’t seen,
How many I have missed,
So intent on the business of this world,
Its instants and circumstances.
Put it like this:
I only noticed too late
How fewer swifts than ever
There were this year about our eaves.
A kind of accidental awareness
That took me unawares, a floundering.
I suppose I could calculate if eight hundred and four
Full moons are more or less
My allotted three score years and ten,
Or if I can rely on a few more I defiantly want to see,
Assuming twelve full moons a year.
Only leap years and years with thirteen full moons
Complicate matters.
Like months with five Sundays.
Bakers’ dozens.
So how many full moons have I missed? Have I seen?
I saw the stars in the southern heavens once.
There seemed to be so many more
Than where my seen or unseen moons
Travelled the accustomed, reliable skies
Of innocence before life called up this balance sheet.
Peter Eustace lives in Verona, Italy, where he works as a translator. He has published two books of poems in English and Italian (Vistas, 2006, and Weathering, 2010) and an English-only pamphlet (Brink, 2009) with erbacce press, Liverpool, joined by a full collection Humanics at the end of 2018, again by erbacce press. A guest at the Valpolicella, Verona, Monte Baldo and Nogara poetry festivals (Italy), as well as the Small Press Day/10th anniversary of the UNESCO World Academy of Poetry in Verona. Featured poet in issue 45 of erbacce magazine (June 2016) and invited poet in the 50th celebration issue of erbacce. He has been published widely, including two of his poems which opened the Carrillon Ten Forward anthology and another poem was also included in the erbacce press NHS anthology Our Beating Heart.