Excerpt from This is How the Moon Will Know Us by Joe Weil

The following lullaby appeared in our Fall 2006 Print Issue 7. The entire issue is available for download in Kindle format.

This is how the moon will know us when we are dead, or almost dead, or near some strange equivalent thereof:

It will know us most unknowingly, as a leaf in the dark caresses a child’s face.

It will string up the sea like a lyre, and play the dark glissando of waves.

Oh hips! Rose startled and sublime!
It will feel most impossibly deep
the needles and pins that prick our unhappy lives.

I swear the moon has no need for beatitude or praise.

I have seen it in an irrigation ditch making a holy thing of filthy water.

This is how the moon will know us
when we are dead or almost dead or near:

it will feel most impossibly deep
the deep divinity we bear: night’s air.

—

JOE WEIL is an assistant professor of poetry and fiction at Binghamton University at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. In 2013, NYQ Books published Weil’s New and Selected Poems, The Great Grandmother Light. Joe’s publishing credits include multiple publications, both in print and online, as well as chapbooks and poetry volumes. He has published in magazines and periodicals, among them: The Journal of New Jersey Poets to The Red Brick Review, Lips, The Paterson Poetry Review and The New York Times. Joe is the Fiction Co-Editor of Ragazine.CC, and resides in his home state of New Jersey with his wife, poet Emily Vogel, and their daughter Clare.