Today Alex Blustin invites to consider the moon and how to produce an original poem on a subject that has captured the minds of poets and artists since time began.
The Moon
How do you find your own approach to a popular subject like The Moon, without repeating all the usual cliches? For today’s prompt, here is an exercise in exploring new perspectives.
First, try homing in on one very specific aspect of the Moon. Then choose a random non-Lunar association of this aspect. Finally, look for whatever might link both of these together with the Moon – however unlikely it seems.
In the following short verse, I started with the concept of the greyness of the Moon, and the unrelated association of grey with bureaucracy. These are then connected by the fact that both bureaucrats and the changing Moon appear to be gatekeepers to interminable mysteries.
This poem appears in the Issue 58 (June 2022) of the light verse webzine Lighten Up Online [link here: https://www.lightenup-online.co.uk/index.php/issue-58-june-2022/2297-interval-one-eight-eights].
The night clerk
Moon, your sly, month-long wink
Implies you’re in on it; you know.
You up there, grey powder-face, hello?
We’d like to ask, but off you slink.
What are we supposed to think –
Discretion or hypocrisy?
The colour of bureaucracy,
You slip away through seas of ink.
Alex Blustin
Alexander Blustin’s light verse has previously appeared in Lighten Up Online, Light Quarterly, The Bell and in audio form on the Poetry Non-Stop blog. His heavier verse has appeared in Popshot and elsewhere. From October 2012 to July 2014 he ran a weekly poetry stall on Cambridge Market (UK), with a particular focus on work from local Modernist and experimental publishers.
If you’ve enjoyed this podcast please consider showing your support with a donation via ko-fi.com
Books by many of the poets featured on the podcast are available from the Poetry Non-Stop bookshop here. All books purchased via this link help to raise money to keep this podcast going.
Poetry Non-Stop 
moon happenings
there is chaos too in the sea of tranquility
whether its faced rocks have wasp nests
we’re going back, i hear
coffee is what we want to know
can we have a cup of lunar coffee yet
how stale bad ideas quickly are
the view from the moon is like
you first fell in love with life, then realized
LikeLike