What do you do at midnight late in the spring, when the planets have set with their love story and the Moon rises brilliant into the night, its last full phase of the season? It’s a time in the year’s cycle when the blossoms give way to the fruiting, when thought becomes word, when word becomes deed…it is a moment of waking in the sleeping, and it is upon us.
This week (May 29 to June 4, 2023), which includes the last few days of May and the first beginnings of June, the Moon is a waxing gibbous, growing along through the stars of Virgo and Libra, until it arrives at Full Phase overnight Saturday, just past the star Antares, the one that marks the heart of the Scorpion, long-held to be a guardian of the threshold into the underworld. We’ll see the Moon near Spica in Virgo on Tuesday, May 30; near Zubenelgenubi in Libra on Thursday, June 1; and then we arrive at midnight Saturday, May 3, with the Full Moon hung in the night near Antares, in Scorpio.
This is where the Moon is going just now, though the Sun is mounting up to its highest place, bringing greater and greater daylgiht. Still, we’re in this liminal space, leaving what has been, anticipating what is yet to be, a space brilliantly articulated in these few words by WS Merwin in this piece from 1963 simply titled “The Poem”:
Coming late, as always,
I try to remember what I almost heard.
The light avoids my eye.
How many times have I heard the locks close
And the lark take the keys
And hang them in heaven.
With my best,
Mary
Hear this episode on air Monday, May 29 Interlochen Public Radio, and on podcasts everywhere,
at your own convenience.