Summer Poetry Pop-Up: Patricia Gray

July Moons

I was born   in a lightning storm
thunder   cracking  sky roof
spirit eye opening   delivery
shaft   folk names of   full moons
humming   branch breaking, falling
street blocked   Buck Moon hiding
off in the reaches   young antlers
pushing-through, itchy, eager
I was born under   day-before
Hay Moon   alfalfa cut, baled
stashed from storm   Born
under   the Mead Moon medieval
old pubs peppering   flat beer
to sell it   Born   a bumpkin
in DC’s   mid-summer moon’s
mischief   a sliver left in me
slim switch of lightning   and this
deep clap of   Thunder Moon.

                               By Patricia Gray

First published in Stickman Review, Winter 2015

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PATRICIA GRAY’s poem incorporates folk names of full moons for July.  Another of her poems, “Moon Smudge,” enjoyed a three-month ride in 2016 as a poster on Arlington Transit buses—part of the Moving Words program of Arlington Arts.  Also that year, she received an artist fellowship from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Gray is an alumna of Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and formerly directed the Library of Congress poetry office.  After leaving the Library, she added two prose pieces about that program to the Splendid Wake Up blog.  She serves on the poetry board of the Folger Shakespeare Library, and in July will teach a “Getting Started: Creative Writing” workshop at the Capitol Hill Center campus of the The Writer’s Center.   Gray also made two recent prose contributions to The Writer’s Center blog spot on Facebook.