National Poetry Month

Before we did Sean Johnston’s stunning debut novel All This Town Remembers in 2006, Gaspereau Press published a little chapbook of his poems called Bull Island as a number in our Devil’s Whim Occasional Chapbook series. This poem is from that chapbook. It is also reprinted in the poetry anthology Gaspereau Gloriatur: Volume 1. — AS


Obviously
Sean Johnston

Obviously, the moon and its shadows,
the moon and what it did, the moon
and its movement with water —

I said it to her, fresh as we were,
I said it to her because the night
had already happened, and the dark,

and we’d missed it and then the moon
with its sudden appearance made sudden
by our muscled ignorance, our concern

with other concerns — the sex, for instance;
the noise of it and would it be wrapped
up properly or would a baby wake up

and announce itself, our baby just next
door, in such a room — and it didn’t and so
suddenly, the moon, and I said it to her

and of course, she said to me, of course.

Copyright © Sean Johnston, 2004