Half Moon

There are days full of peculiarities, odd moments that make you think there is much more to this life than we can truly understand.

The lunar cycle at the moment is a Waxing Gibbous, 60% full. What I like to call a half moon.

It is as if the moon is made from paper and one of the gods practising his origami has folded it in half. It is a perfect half circle. There are no shimmery, ragged bits the way there are when a child cuts paper circles in half, just one unblemished edge.

I saw the half moon for the first time last night. I did what I used to do when I was a child, imagining that the people who lived on the half moon walked around with their eyes half open or half closed, unable to open them fully until the moon reached her full, complete point of splendour.

I fell asleep, eyes half closed like a spy, and in the morning one half moon after another came into view.

The possums had left mandarin peel on the grass. Orange semicircles in a row. The local graffiti tag team had coloured in the stop sign at the end of the laneway, so it was now a half circle that said : Don’t Stop!

In the cafe there were salads topped with semicircles of bocconcini, fish dishes covered with half circles of lemon, and Neenish tarts, half black, half white.

The lady in the history section at the library was wearing a geometric print of semicircles and lines in orange, black and red. There was a new book on display about patterns in nature with a picture of rocks in a river on the front, shot so that the rocks appeared as if they had been sliced in two.

A group of guys drove past me in an old Falcon, the chassis so low to the ground, their wheels were semicircles skimming the road. A teenager asked me the way to the bank, wearing those groovy half circle sunglasses all the rock stars wore in the ’60s.

At twilight the clouds gathered, sheared in two, gently as egg whites being folded and separated.

The moon rose casting a glow over only one half of the garden. It was a pale silver world, half moonlight, half shadows. I wondered how those in the shadows felt as they gazed out into the half-lit part of their world.

And how did the moon creatures feel, infected with half moon fever? Were they angry? Were they bereft? Did the dark side sleep? Did the light side play? Did they take turns running from side to side? Or did they accept the waxing and waning of the moon as a reminder of the inevitability of change?

I like the half moon. There is a sense of anticipation about it, like a bubble coming from a glass blower’s pipe that is not yet fully formed. I like how it hangs there, Mother Nature’s geometry lesson; an outline waiting to be filled in.