The Man in the Moon

Billy Collins, 2001

He used to frighten me in the nights of childhood,
the wide adult face, enormous, stern, aloft.
I could not imagine such loneliness, such coldness.

But tonight as I drive home over these hilly roads
I see him sinking behind the stands of winter trees
and rising again to show his familiar face.

And when he comes into full view over the open fields
he looks like a young man who has fallen in love with the dark earth,

a pale bachelor, well-groomed and full of melancholy,
his round mouth open
as if he had just broken into song.

← Back to Poems