Glimpses of the Moon


     Clouds race
     Past the moon
     Not a night for sleeping
     But a night for thinking "thoughts
     Beyond the reaches of our souls" as 
     Shakespeare said.

     Half of my life 
     Is gone, mused a nineteenth century
     Poet on a nineteenth century moon
     And what mark has been made 
     By me upon the sands 
     Of time?  What hand print?  What
     Footprint? lamented the bard
     What poem will 
     Survive to be 
     Read in the twentieth
     Century?
     What poem to be read
     For ever?

            The End



     Notes: I have seen this titled "Glimpses".  Gram writes in 
            her notes: 
            "Shakespeare from Hamlet.
            `What may this mean,
            That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
            Revisit'st thus [the glimpses of the moon]
            Making night hideous, and 
            we fools of nature
            So horribly to shake our disposition
            With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?'

            Hamlet soliloquized between `glimpses of the moon'
            Between `glimpses of the moon' soliloquied Hamlet."

            Whatever.