Why the moon has majestic importance to me - Ian McMillan

We’ve had some spectacular moons this spring, sharp slivers of silver that grow into great red beach balls as the calendar turns.

Sometimes the moon has seemed so close that you can almost touch it and at the other end of the month it’s felt like the ghost of itself.

I started thinking about how important the moon was to me both in real life and in the books I’ve read.

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The Yorkshire Post columnist Ian McMillanThe Yorkshire Post columnist Ian McMillan
The Yorkshire Post columnist Ian McMillan
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As I grew up in the 1960s the moon loomed huge in my fevered teenage imagination not only for its remoteness but also, paradoxically, for its closeness because at that point in the 20th century everybody was convinced that in a few years we’d be having holidays on the moon.

It would be like Cleethorpes with craters. And the night Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in July 1969 remains one of my greatest memories.

My dad and I stood in the garden and he pointed at the moon and said, his voice breaking with emotion, ‘‘There’s men on there, Ian lad. Men walking on there.’’

Years later, clearing out a box from a loft, I found a reel of tape with the words ‘‘Moon Landing’’ written on it; of course I couldn’t play it because I didn’t have a tape recorder but it was still a precious object.

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I remembered that I held the microphone close to our black and white TV and that you could hear the famous phrase ‘‘One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind’’ in a crackly voice.

The moon is also the star (ha! See what I did there?) of two of my favourite poems. One is Full Moon and Little Frieda by the great Yorkshire poet Ted Hughes, and it’s about an evening that, in Hughes’s words, ‘‘had shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket’’ and Frieda, Hughes’s daughter who was a child at the time, saying ‘‘Moon! Moon!’’ followed by the beautiful lines ‘‘The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work/that points at him amazed.’’ I wish I’d written that.

The other moon poem I wish I’d written is Autumn by the Imagist poet TE Hulme. The imagist writers, at the start of the 20th century, wanted to create a pure kind of poetry that concentrated on image rather than explanation.

In Autumn the poet writes ‘‘A touch of cold in the autumn night/I walked abroad,/And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge/like a red-faced farmer.’’ That image has stayed with me for decades.

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So, next time there’s a full moon, have a go at writing something about it, something simple, something imagistic.

The singer Tom Waits once referred to a ‘‘buttery cueball moon’’ and that may well do for starters. And the great thing about the moon is that it will be there forever. Unless it really is a balloon.

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