POETRY

Moon Over Blue Ridge

By Donna J. Gelagotis Lee     VOLUME 52.4

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The ridge was never really blue
but green or snowy. And the moon
was a dollop of cream at the top,
where we would ride sometimes,

when the sun was up over morning
and the hills were golden green, the trees
skipping down the ridge till there were too
many and they bundled up till the mountain

was full to Lexington. That moon’d travel there
too, put its bear teeth on the road, settle over
the valley like silk. It wasn’t a hard moon or
a blue moon. The whole mountain and valley held

it like a cradle. That’s why the ridge seems blue,
because the moon confuses. I’ve seen a car
or two skid around that range, tire mark
the curves. But it’d get home. We all got home.

You could tell the way like a soft bed waiting,
like a blue lullaby. It’d sing in the hills, softly,
so that you could barely detect it but, rather,
you could sense it in the air in the crisp morning

when it was still gentle, the way you supposed
nature to be while you were asleep. We all knew
better, but this was a nicer thought, much like
thinking the Blue Ridge were really blue, as some

people do when the sunlight hits them just right
and the blue spruce puff out in a long exhale
the way you would after you’d spun close
to the lookout and then back onto the road

with your breath caught in your gasp
and the mountain leveling out with fir trees,
or perhaps it really is the poplar or
eucalyptus in the distance, though that is not

what I recall all those years within them,
with the forest at my feet and a ridge of earth
rising to push the oak to the pine and cascade
back down again with a long breath and sigh.

 






DONNA J. GELAGOTIS LEE is the author of two award-winning collections, Intersection on Neptune (The Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2019), winner of the Prize Americana for Poetry 2018, and On the Altar of Greece (Gival Press, 2006), winner of the 2005 Gival Press Poetry Award and recipient of a 2007 Eric Hoffer Book Award: Notable for Art Category. Her poetry has appeared in publications internationally, including the Bitter Oleander, Feminist Studies, the Massachusetts Review, Terrain.org : A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments, and Women’s Studies Quarterly. Her website is donnajgelagotislee.com.


VOLUME 52.4