What smallest being sees the moon?
I would not have guessed I could,
without having rested my look
on that gray weigh station
that holds my eyes in balance
with the sun’s, a triangle
(I look at the moon, the moon
looks at the sun, the sun
looks at me)
preventing macular scar.
Such long light held by my robin’s eggs,
eyes so minor I doubt my alignment:
I wonder if I endlessly loop some lamp,
keeping in front to throw my shadow,
a representative to try the way,
who I can’t follow without merging.
We should not shine light just
because the sky shines light at us,
but we can’t help turning into
what we watch.
Dale Tracy is the author of the poetry collection Derelict Bicycles (Anvil Press, 2022). She is a faculty member in the English Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.
Questions and Answers
What inspired or motivated you to write this poem?
This poem began while I was crouching down to look at a snail on the ground. I wondered if it could see the sky. Then I got surprised that I can see the sky because I am also a small creature here on earth. Despite this feeling of planetary connection, I thought about how being able to perceive the sky’s light seems to make some humans feel like light is under our control, or should be. When any of us get caught up in having power, things go wrong—like a moth stuck at an artificial light that disrupts its navigation. That’s why the poem brings up the idea of balance in relation to our inability to look directly at the sun without negative consequence and turns the speaker’s eyes (metaphorically) into delicate robin’s eggs. The non-human animals the poem invokes are figurative because the poem deals with the human speaker’s feeling of tension at being part of the shared world but grappling with the effects of power exerted instead of wonder felt.
What poetic techniques did you use in this poem? How much attention do you pay to form and metre?
The couplets suggest the balance that interests the poem, and this form duplicates the poem’s doubles (the speaker and the shadow, the sun and the moon, the two eyes, the sky and us). This form also offers some tension with the idea of triangulation that spills outside of the couplet (the world’s forms will always exceed the ones we make).
How did your writing process unfold around this poem? How did you write, edit, and refine it?
Before I added the final lines, the poem ended on “We should not shine light just / because the sky shines light at us.” These lines felt almost like a heroic couplet with the slant rhyme of “just” and “us.” The repeated words added to a strong sense of conclusion. This wasn’t, though, the right conclusion: I didn’t want to end on this corrective, especially one that might seem to say that we don’t have anything in common with the natural world. The revised ending affirms that humans are part of the natural world, inevitably. This ending is an invitation to be part of the balance by seeing the world in a way that lets us be well in it.
What did you find particularly challenging in writing this poem?
The challenge I faced writing this poem was cynicism or despair threatening the wonder that initiated the poem. Since this struggle happens in my mind, it happens in my poems. I tell my mind and my poems to remember all the good work for environmental justice that I and anyone can be part of.