February 9, 2009
Monday

The last full moon of February
stalks the fields; barbed wire casts a shadow.
Rising slowly, a beam moved toward the west
stealthily changing position

until now, in the small hours, across the snow
it advances on my pillow
to wake me, not rudely like the sun
but with the cocked gun of silence.
          — Jane Cooper, 1924-2007
              American poet
              “Hunger Moon”

I opened my eyes this morning to a light falling across my face and thought for a moment I’d fallen asleep in my study. A street light hangs just outside the east window in that room, its yellow glow piercing the darkness and making an eerie gloss when it bounces off snow. But I was in my own bed, and I could see even without my glasses that the light came from the moon, floating between Levines’ house and Morrisons’, pale and full.

Native American tribes of the northeast called the last full moon before the spring equinox the Hunger Moon. The food stores laid by in the fall were dwindling, and hunting and fishing had become too difficult to produce much. There was a danger that the food would run out before spring. If you lived through the Hunger Moon, you found yourself in another spring and your survival for another year was pretty well assured. For 19th century farmers the Hunger Moon meant that stored feed for their livestock was running low, but it was too early to plant.

There is something about the full moon that mesmerizes me. In November of 2007 I stayed up with it most of the night as it moved over the property in Wyoming where I was sojourning. Sometimes it surprises me when I go out after dark, appearing fat and glistening behind the rising garage door. For a while I had a crescent moon-shaped garden that had nothing but white flowers. I kept a white plastic lawn chair beside it, and sometimes on full moon nights I would go out there to think and reflect as moonbeams danced off the daffodils.

I have an autobiographical essay about my mother’s cooking that begins I was born under the Hunger Moon, and I have been hungry all my life. The moon was full on March 7, 1947, two nights before I was born. This year it will occur on March 10, the day after my birthday. As it rises, I will be sitting down to my first dinner with the other fellows at the Hambidge Artist Residency in Georgia. I will have spent my birthday traveling to this new period in my development as a fiction writer.

Tonight I am hungry for that time to begin. The moon under which I write this piece is my hunger moon this year.

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