Moonrise Poems, by Diane Fahey

Moonrise, by Charles-François Daubigny (France) 1877

At Moonrise  
 
Beyond the river, an off-white moon 
balances on a tree crown 
dense with darkness.
 
Close by, broad-brushed canopies 
tower against the sky's 
milky lavender, its mélange of 
 
grey tones with deepening blue. 
And there's a remnant of pink – 
the sunset's persistence – 
 
in a cloud breach above the moon, 
its mandalic form a constant
amidst all this flux and flourishing.
 
Holding as much of the scene 
as it can, the silkening water 
gives daylight more time, 
 
a last shining clarity, 
gives a smooth silvery depth
to the clouds' charged impasto.
 
Herons search down from their stillness 
above white stutters of reflection; 
among the reeds' green shadows
 
the tufted ducks, homeward bound – 
bright, sure fragments   
in a crystalline sanctuary.
 
This, then, would seem a moment
when everything dwells, 
as if forever, on the brink of nightfall.
 
Step back, find the right distance
and they resolve into a whole:
birds, leafy boughs, dusk sky, mirror waters.

A Moonlit River Landscape, by Charles-François Daubigny (France) c. 1855

​Threshold
  
There must be a fallen sun 
close under the horizon
 
for these rose cloud-colours to prevail, 
reshaping the moon, brokenly gold,
 
in a sky wherein the blue of day 
companions night's indigo.
 
The river, richly darkened by 
tree shadows, captures
 
that sky, moment by moment,
lending shine and substance.
 
Easy, once you have accepted 
that everything is passing, becoming,
 
to enter this summer night scene,
its serene atmosphere – 
 
rendered, with heartfelt attention,
through the glide and risk of oils.
 
Each presence holds its own freedom:
the human figures on the far bank,
 
those high trees roughly, loosely 
clad in many greens,
 
a vermilion sailing boat 
poised on its double, waiting.

Moonrise at Barbizon, by Charles-François Daubigny (France) 1845

A Hill in Barbizon
 
"'In clarity lies the serene."
Claire Keyes, "Mozart at Seventeen" 
 
Water has been found on the moon,
now they say. But nothing growing.
 
Here, framing it, two trees – 
one dense as a forest when I zoom in,
 
a welter of twigs, dark boughs,
the other sparser, lighter 
 
with fan-like branches touched by the moon.
Zoom out, and together they loom 
 
wide and high, would eat the space of the painting.
Back in close-up, the moon wears 
 
the whiteness and cream of milk,
the yellow of butter – a few plain strokes
 
that translate to a glowing clarity
as the full view is restored. 
 
The sky, an alchemical grey, 
holds a gold trace; under the air's half-gleam,
 
that rise of stony earth. A pearl hangs 
amid gloaming's subtle treasury.
 
*

Claire Keyes, "Mozart at Seventeen" is from What Diamonds Can Do, Cherry Grove Collections, 2015.

Moonrise, by Stanislaw Masłowski (Poland) 1884

Moonrise
  
The moon, its luminance
potent and calm,
beyond question,
 
casts towards you
a long glimmer
that becomes, as you gaze,
 
an unrolled golden carpet – 
an invitation
to walk on water.
 
Along its left side,
the mirrored uplift of
aspens beyond the river.
 
On the right, an embankment, 
its row of trees starkly 
in leaf, the closest 
 
seeming to grow from light.
A flowered plant leans out
to be silhouetted by gold,
 
lends its tiny articulations
to this place of mingling – 
much as those splayed twigs
 
etch the moon itself,
crossed by a thread of cloud,
its base tinged with amber.
 
The force of darkness – 
as ever, conclusive – 
is, for a stayed moment,
 
in equipoise with
this proxy of the sun – 
closure and promise
 
inhabiting, gauntly,
resplendently, 
these sky-glazed waters. 

Two unlit geese
are headed this way
over the marshes;
 
another, touching down,
leaves a trail, silken white,
on steeping shadows.

Night of the Meteors, by Jean-Francois Millet (France) 1850-1865

Night of the Meteors
   
The night earth with its pelt of grass,
low shrubs, is duskily agleam as if 
illumined by its own power of growing.
 
A road for human comings and goings 
runs through the stony terrain. Tilting up 
from the horizon, a spectral farm cart.
 
Below that line a yellow fire,
soon to appear – but the stars still reign,
sprinkled like silver leaves on a tree – 
 
a dark blue tree. Meteors arc down.
Millet, devotee of the real sky, 
plotted the constellations with care – 
 
the sword of Orion and Canis Major
cloudily precise, in their storied splendour.
He envisioned the landscape, too,
 
as part of a continuous whole – 
each side curving away to further realms,
and finally towards the other.
 
From a distant time, my gaze enters 
this revealed expanse,
this cosmic intimacy of earth and sky,
 
its depths of darkness, depths of light: 
mysteries alive in the brushwork, 
spare or densely textured.
 
A painting can be a window, a lens, 
but the realization of this one, 
seeded in a moment, would stretch to years 
 
as Millet dreamed his way into the scene – 
standing on known earth, in the last of starlight,
his breathing body calm as the planet spun.
 
 Diane Fahey

Author's Note: Millet's Starry Night, c. 1850-1865, was mainly painted over two years and seemingly completed around 1852, but it was retouched some fifteen years later. It is in the collection of Yale University Art Gallery.

A Wikipedia article on the painting provides the following information:
"One of Millet's students, Edward Wheelwright, wrote that, according to Millet, "Every landscape, however small, should contain the possibility of being indefinitely extended on either side; every glimpse of the horizon should be felt to be a segment of the great circle that bounds out vision…'Millet executed Starry Night with this philosophy in mind. … It is also possible that Millet observed the shooting stars he painted in the sky in a meteor shower known as the Orionids. This meteor shower is active during the month of October and would indicate that the light green horizon is the sun rising, not setting."
​
Diane Fahey, an Australian poet, is the author of sixteen poetry collections, most recently The Light Café (Liquid Amber Press, 2023) and Sanctuaries, (Puncher & Wattmann, 2024). She has received various awards and fellowships for her poetry, including the ACT Government’s Judith Wright Prize, and been shortlisted for six other major book awards. Her poetry has been published widely in Australia and internationally, over a period of forty years, and been represented in over 80 anthologies, most recently in Buzz Words and Spellbound (Penguin Random House). Her PhD in Creative Writing from UWS is titled Places and Spaces of the Writing Life. <dianefaheypoet.com>