Five short scenes, each touched by the moon, make up "Lunar." Nothing links them in a story, so the reader has to feel the connections. A newly hatched luna moth has wings that seem too big for its body. A starving kitten cries under a full moon. A round-faced girl at school blurs into a crowd of girls with the same name. An old book, *You Will Go To The Moon*, still smells new in memory, forty years later. Last, someone steps out of the dark woods into a pool of moonlight and suddenly notices their own boots.
The speaker mostly observes, but the poem keeps returning to awkwardness, hunger, and the passing of time. The moth doesn't fit its wings yet, and the speaker, in the final lines, feels oddly exposed. The mood is quiet, a little wistful, and gently strange, as if the moon makes ordinary things look newly odd.