Friday, September 28, 2007

It's Only a Harvest Moon



Under the Harvest Moon

When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.

Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

Carl Sandburg


We had a harvest moon Wednesday night, a real one. The full moon that is closest by date to the autumnal equinox is a true harvest moon, but it has come to mean any golden-colored full moon occurring on a fall evening. Thursday night's moon looked just as full and it was that wonderful golden yellow color, the one that gives one of my favorite echinaceas its name. Coincidentally, I harvested seed from my 'Harvest Moon' yesterday.

The harvest moon got its name because of the light it gives to farmers working after sunset to bring in the harvest. Some people believe the harvest moon shines brighter than any other full moon of the year. I don't know about that, but when I happened to wake up in the middle of the night last night, I would have sworn the sun was coming up, the sky was so light. I'll bet you could read large print by the light of the moon these nights.


It is the Harvest Moon!
On gilded vanes

And roofs of villages, on woodland crests

And their aerial neighborhoods of nests

Deserted, on the curtained window-panes

Of rooms where children sleep, on country lanes

And harvest-fields, its mystic splendor rests!

Gone are the birds that were our summer guests,

With the last sheaves return the laboring wains!

All things are symbols: the external shows

Of Nature have their image in the mind,

As flowers and fruits and falling of the leaves;

The song-birds leave us at the summer's close,

Only the empty nests are left behind,

And pipings of the quail among the sheaves.


Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

4 comments:

Yolanda Elizabet Heuzen said...

Ah, working by the light of a harvest moon. I feel a poem coming up or a song. ;-)

I love walking in the countryside when there's a full moon, it's magic!

Kylee Baumle said...

Romie and I take moonlight walks every now and then. We love it, too! We've been known to work in the gardens by the light of the moon, too. It's a special feeling you get when you do that. :-)

Unknown said...

I'm curious as to what you'll get from your Harvest Moon echinacea seeds, Kylee--where they're a hybrid of some sort they probably won't come true, but it will be fun to see what they DO produce. Maybe yellow. Maybe pink. Maybe something else (depends on their parents, I suspect).
Lovely shot of the moon, too; we saw it quite nicely before the *much welcome* rain came on last night and this morning.

Kylee Baumle said...

Yes, it's always interesting what comes from hybrids seeds, isn't it? I have been saving the 'Zowie' zinnia seeds, too, and that will be interesting as well.

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