Dave Bonta's "Harvest Moon" promises a nature poem and then spends most of its length showing how hard nature is to find. The moon of the title, traditionally the big full moon of early autumn, barely appears as itself. Instead we get a rock concert, spotlights, tombstones and a long drive. The central idea, as I read it, is that artificial brightness has crowded out the darkness that moon poems depend on, and that this costs us both poetry and a kind of peace.
The first stanza is a run of metaphors with no verbs and no explanation: "ravaged ladder / house of straw / fine hair on the face of a fetus / the thumbprint of God." The poem never says what they describe, but given the title it is reasonable to take them as attempts to name the moon or the season it presides over. Each image is fragile or marked by a touch: a ladder left over from picking, a flimsy straw house, the soft down on an unborn child, a smudge left by a divine finger. They move from damage to tenderness to awe, as if the speaker were trying on every available vocabulary for wonder.
Then the poem swerves into the manufactured. "Breakdowns are part of the act / this time of year" works two ways. It could mean a performer's mishaps, and it could mean autumn's decay, when things fail and fall apart. The "rock concert's fake fog" is then "taken straight from a Song Dynasty landscape," so even the stage effect is borrowed from art, and that art was itself a way of picturing mist on real mountains. The poem shows copies of copies, with the original nowhere in view.
The third stanza turns harsher in sound and image. The repeated "feedback feedback," with its wide gap on the page, is the squeal of an overdriven amplifier, but it also hints at a loop in which a system only answers itself. Then come the "captive cormorants in choke collars," which draws on the traditional fishing practice of fitting a ring on the bird's throat so it can't swallow its catch. These birds are "unable to swallow even / the ghost of a fish." The line break leaves "even" hanging before the faint, spectral "ghost" arrives. The birds do the work and get nothing, and we might suspect the performers, the crowd or the poet of being in the same position.
The fourth stanza is the poem's most carefully balanced. Two sentences mirror each other: "nobody waxes poetic / under spotlights as bright as these / nobody lies down / under tombstones as white as these." "Bright" and "white" nearly rhyme, and the repeated "these" gives the lines a flat, accusing tone. The verb "waxes" is a quiet pun, since the moon waxes too, and no poet can wax while the lights are on. The spotlights and the tombstones are linked by their glare. Both are cold, public and over-lit, and neither allows the rest or reflection the dark would.
The last stanza drops into the ordinary: "you have to drive an hour to find / a dark enough night for dissolution." Darkness has become something you commute to. "Dissolution" is deliberately open. Judging by the imagery, it could mean the self dissolving into the night, or the dissolving of that fake fog, or death itself. Then the poem ends on the brief, almost sighing "poor moon / poor harvest." The long "oo" sounds in "poor" and "moon" make a small moan, and the pity is double, for the moon that goes unseen and for a harvest that has become only a word.
Formally the poem is free verse, with no rhyme scheme, no punctuation and no capital letters. Five four-line stanzas give it a steady frame while the lines vary in length and mood. Its juxtapositions, with images set side by side and left to react, recall the compression of East Asian poetry, and the Song Dynasty reference seems to nod that way. That restraint is part of its force. It never lectures about light pollution. It lets a fake fog, a squealing speaker and a hungry bird make the case, then closes with two words of pity.