Saltus Lunae

Roy Woolley

for Simon Wingfield

The tilting seasons define
the world we occupy
spinning anti-clockwise

like the sun but faster.
A single-sided moon
outstares two origins

and continues to draw
our harbouring seas
into flickering tides.

Distance brings us close
to the nature of things,
and the gaps we perceive

explain where we are
as we watch them again
becoming themselves.

We note the patterned skies
brightening our minds
and fix them on stone

or discs of greenish metal
or paint them on vellum
with swirls of candescent gold

interwoven like breath
to light the steps we know
we haven’t taken yet

on endless roads that spin
as rapidly as we do
and so appear still.

The Science

In the early Christian Church, the date of Easter was derived from the 15th day of the Jewish month of Nisan when Passover began. The underlying Hebrew calendar (whose origins can be traced to Babylon in the 6th century BCE) was lunisolar and based on the yearly observations of the sun along with the corresponding monthly changes in the moon's position. The Church's view changed in 325 CE when the Council of Nicaea decreed that the dates of Easter should be calculated without reference to other festivals; unfortunately, they did not indicate how this should be done. Clarity was only partially restored by Bede's 'The Reckoning of Time' in 725 CE; his calculations involved subtracting a lunar day (the 'leap of the moon' of the poem's title) every nineteen years so that the observed lunar and solar cycles were correctly aligned.

Our species has always watched the movements of the sun, moon, and stars and, by recording them, somehow bridged the distance between them and us. Our scientific theories and the experimental evidence that supports them also attempt to reach across these distances with explanations of what we see and why. Modern cosmology tells us that everything spins from our planet (1000 mph) to the sun, whose average axial rotation takes 27 days and where the poles (38 days) and the equator (24.5 days) move at different rates as befits a superhot sphere consisting of ionized plasma. Indeed, our entire solar system is spinning around the centre of the Milky Way at approximately 448,000 mph. The disc mentioned towards the end of the poem refers to the Nebra sky disc, dated around 1800–1600 BCE.

The Poet

Roy Woolley lives and works in Derby, UK. Recent work has appeared in PulseBeat, The Crank, Gallus (Poetry Scotland) and the Hammond House poetry/song competition anthologies Stardust (2021) and Changes (2022).

Next poem: Second law by Barbara Cumbers