After reading Joyce Sidman’s “Winter Bees and Other Poems of the Cold” last year (and yes, falling madly in love with it), I was delighted to find out that there was another collaboration with her and the same illustrator, Rick Allen.

Yet sadly, here I loved the concept (a book of poetry about things that are awake at night) more than the actual execution.  It doesn’t sing as much as “Winter Poems” did to me.  The art work is every bit as gorgeous (and I imagine every bit as time consuming to create).  It is yet another poetry collection with nonfiction matter (which I also love), but … it just didn’t capture my imagination as much as I wanted it to.  I don’t know why.  Maybe if I had read it first, I would’ve loved it more?  I cannot say.

And yet, there were still poems that I was enchanted with.  The one about the owl had the words printed on the page in the shape of an owl!  I didn’t realize it at first, but when I did, I was blown away.  NICELY done!  And yet, that is not the poem I share here today.

For some reason, this one captured my imagination more.  Perhaps it is because I became fascinated with the form of the ubi sunt.  I’ve seen Sidman use this form in a couple of collections now and I had to track down more information about it.  I don’t know that I see “death” in the setting of the moon, but perhaps to the moon every setting would feel like a little death.  And certainly the daily moon cycle is the perfect topic for the transitory nature of life (as well as being the perfect ending to this particular book–odd that the sun rising would be an ending, instead of a beginning!).