The Last Quarter Moon of the Dying Year

The last quarter moon of the dying year,
Pendant behind a naked cottonwood tree
On a frosty, dawning morning
With the back of her silver head
Turned to the waking sun.
Quiet like the waters
Of Galilee
After the Lord had bid them
“Peace, be still.”
O silent beauty, indescribable!

Dead, do they say?
Would God that I shall seem
So beautiful in death.

Credit

From Caroling Dusk (Harper & Brothers, 1927), edited by Countee Cullen. This poem is in the public domain.

Author

Jonathan Henderson Brooks

Jonathan Henderson Brooks was born on a farm near Lexington, Mississippi, in 1904. His parents divorced when he was eleven. Brooks’s four siblings—three sisters and a brother—went to live with their father, while Brooks remained with their mother. They subsisted as sharecroppers in Lexington, then Brooks left home to attend Jackson College. While there, he won first prize in a short story contest. In the fall of 1923, he entered Lincoln University in Missouri and graduated from its high school department in 1925. Brooks then enrolled at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi.

Date Published

01/01/1927