A moon watches a star die and, instead of simply grieving, begins to want what it is watching. That small shift drives the whole poem. On the surface it is a scene from space, but its central idea is human: the ache of being a spectator, of living by borrowed light, and the longing to have something, even an ending, that belongs entirely to you.
The structure is built around a refrain. "And as the star died" opens the poem, returns twice in the middle, and comes back a final time just before the last line. Each return marks a change. The first stretch is about habit: the moon "watched on from afar, as it always did" and "reflected the suns rays, as it always did." The phrase "as it always did" turns the moon into a creature of routine. It is also quietly cruel, because the moon makes no light of its own. It only reflects. The poem plants this detail early, so that when the moon later craves "it's own colour," we already understand what it lacks.
The void gets its own pair of lines, with the matching phrase "as it always was." It is "splattered with colour" and also "a silently patient witness." "Splattered" is a surprising word for a dying star. It sounds like spilled paint, messy and almost careless, and it makes space feel like a canvas. Putting colour and silence side by side is striking too, since a death this vivid happens without a sound. The void and the moon are both witnesses, but the void is patient and the moon, we soon learn, is not.
Then the poem turns on the wish, repeated for emphasis: "the moon wished it could meet it's end." Meeting an end is a lovely way to put it, as if death were a person arriving. What the moon asks for is built from the star's own qualities: "colourful," "silent," "beautiful." The star becomes the template. But the poem keeps pushing against copying. The end should be "similar to the stars," should resemble "others of it's kind," yet be "wholly its own." The line holding that tension is the longest in the poem, and it spills over its edges as though the moon cannot say it fast enough.
The most telling moment is the list "it's own colour, it's own debris, it's own silence, it's own beauty." Four times the word "own" insists on possession. Notice "debris" sitting between colour and silence. The moon doesn't only want the glamorous parts of dying. It wants the wreckage too, because wreckage that belongs to you is still proof you existed. The poem has no capital letters or full stops, and "it's" appears where standard usage would give "its." This gives the voice a rushed, unpolished, spoken quality. It suits the moon's mood, a thought that keeps going and never settles into a neat sentence.
The poem is free verse with no end rhyme and no fixed metre. Repetition does the work that rhyme usually does: "as it always did," "an end that," and the returning "and as the star died" create a steady beat that the long lines then stretch and the final line cuts off. After all that accumulation, "the moon mourned" is the shortest line, and its sound is an echo. "Moon" and "mourned" share their opening sound and a similar vowel, so the moon's name almost contains its grief.
The poem never says what the moon mourns. It could be the star. It could be its own unreachable ending. It could be both at once, and the title, "the loss of moon," keeps that open. Without the article, "moon" reads less like an object and more like a name or even a substance, something that can be lost. One way to read it is that the moon loses a little of itself while watching another's dramatic end.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it fits into so few lines. It shows grief and envy sitting together without apology, and it gives the feeling of living in someone else's light a cosmic scale. Anyone who has watched another person's life burn brightly and wondered what their own would look like will recognise the moon. Its wish is not really to die. It wants to be distinct, to leave behind a colour that no one else could have made.