Wolf Moon
Hold on, they said, but she was tiny and let
the kite go flying above tears and treetops.
The kite had a will of its own, and its will
was wind which carried it the way love carries
surrender and forgiveness. I was right behind
and watched until hope was a speck and gone.
I’d have let it swoop me up the way a bird
of prey lifts a rabbit or a mouse, not afraid
to rub my nose in sky and roll about in deep
fields of snow far above cirrostratus.
Not afraid to let bliss devour me whole.
Or grief, if I must live my forever in orbit
with the Wolf Moon as it prowls night
after night howling for the wilderness we lost.
Copyright © 2025 by Susan Mitchell. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 21, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“‘Wolf Moon’ begins my series of poems titled ‘From the Lunar Calendar of the Black Hole Oracle.’ Because wolves howl more in cold weather, many peoples have called the first full moon of January ‘Wolf Moon.’ I think of the moon as a feminine energy, and in this unrhymed sonnet, that energy is enraged by our reckless destruction of the natural world. Though the narrator transcends the loss that launches the poem, their momentary bliss is transformed to grief on recalling the far greater loss of wildernesses we have destroyed—for me, reminiscent of the loss of Eden.”
—Susan Mitchell
Susan Mitchell
Susan Mitchell is the author of Erotikon (HarperCollins, 2000); Rapture (HarperCollins, 1992), a finalist for the 1992 National Book Award; and The Water Inside the Water (Wesleyan University Press, 1983), reissued by HarperCollins in 1994.
Mitchell is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Mitchell lives in Boca Raton, Florida.