The moon is usually asked to be romantic. Here it is asked to be dependable, and the poem's sadness grows out of that choice. The speaker looks back at a love that ended not in a quarrel or a betrayal but through slow drift, and the moon explains both why the love felt safe and why it was lost.
The opening is careful about its logic. "Once" sits alone on its line, half fairy-tale opening, half admission that this happened one time and is over. The comparison then arrives slowly, through a pile of qualifications ("in the same way, / & for the same reason") before the colon finally releases "I love the moon." The next lines read like a piece of folk wisdom: "you don't need to see it every day, / to know that you'll see it again." The shift to "you" makes the idea feel shared and obvious. "Always" appears twice in two lines, and the repetition sounds reassuring at first. Only later does it sound like a mistake.
The turn comes with "…& then", and the ellipses on either side of the stanza break make the poem seem to hold its breath. What follows is a chain of "became": "months became years & those years / became the unnoticed mouldering kiss." Nobody in this sentence does anything. Time is the only actor, which is exactly the point, since neglect is something that happens while no one is acting. The kiss image is the strangest in the poem. A kiss is meant to be immediate and warm, but this one has been left like food at the back of a cupboard. The word "unnoticed" tells us the decay was invisible to both people until it was complete. Then the language cools in step: "stale, / old & cold." The chime of "old" and "cold" gives the line a flat finality. "The empty bed" is the first solid domestic object in the poem, and the line break after "as the" leaves the article hanging before the bed appears, so the line itself feels briefly empty.
The last stanzas turn inward. "So lonely not knowing how to explain / until too late" is ambiguous. The speaker may have been unable to explain to the other person, or unable to explain even to themselves, and the missing subject makes the helplessness feel wider. Then comes the poem's cruelest echo: "strange to find how changed / the feeling is when found again." "Again" is the word that earlier promised the moon's return, and now it delivers a feeling that has returned altered. Like the moon, it has come back, but not as it was.
After that, the poem isolates a single line: "the pain so far away." It stands apart, as distant on the page as it claims to be. The closing "just like the Moon" reverses the opening. The moon began as the image of a love that was close because it was certain, and it ends as the image of a pain that is visible but remote. The capital M, against the lowercase "moon" earlier, makes it look like something elevated and untouchable. There is also an unresolved question. A faint pain might mean healing, or it might mean the speaker has lost the ability to feel the loss properly, and the poem doesn't say which.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no fixed rhyme or metre. The lines are short and uneven, and the ampersands give them a quick, informal, almost typed-in-passing feel that contrasts with the heaviness of what is being said. The title, "Momento from the full moon," reads as a variant of "memento," a keepsake, and a full moon is the point of greatest brightness before it begins to wane, so the title suggests a souvenir from a love at its fullest.
What makes the poem worth reading is its honesty about blame. There is no villain. The danger it names is certainty: because the speaker was sure of the moon, they stopped looking at it. It takes a comforting idea, that real love survives absence, and shows how the same idea can excuse the silence that ends it.