On Luna Moth at Night by Chloe Honum
By Tarfia Faizullah
Hi, I’m Tarfia Faizullah, here for Poets on the Plains. Today, I’m excited to share a poem with you by Chloe Honum, a poet whose poems I’m very fond of.
Chloe Honum is the author of two poetry collections, The Lantern Room and The Tulip-Flame, and a chapbook, Then Winter, all beautifully rendered, as her poems are. For good reason, her poems and essays have appeared in terrific periodicals such as The Yale Review, The Paris Review, and Poetry, and understandably, she has been awarded residencies from the James Merrill House, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Raised in Auckland, New Zealand, she currently lives in Texas.
I want to linger on this last bit for a spell–as someone who was born in New York and grew up in Texas, then left for many years only to return, I am intrigued by poets who make their home in Texas after growing up elsewhere, especially because those folks I think have such a specific–and, as is true in Honum’s case–luminous–response to their environments. I think this particular poem by Honum really showcases how a single encounter with something outside oneself–in this case, a luna moth–can lead to a poem full of revelatory insights about both the world and oneself. Here’s the poem:
Luna Moth at Night Pale green queen, in your fourth and final form, you did not come this far to be eaten. In flight, the long tails of your hindwings flutter, creating the illusion of multiple targets. Watching you, I wonder if writing and erasing is one of my creaturely instincts— fingers darting— sentences there, then gone, the alphabet swept flat by silence. You have fine veins and maroon margins on your broad front wings. Your enemies are bats, owls, and hornets. Mine are men who lunged at my life in both fast and slow motion. You travel now how you must, spinning phantoms. I write light, safe clearing, river, erase it, then write it again, until it slips like a leaf into morning.
Used with permission
Gosh, I love this gorgeous poem! Let me delve into a few of the reasons why. First of all, I want to direct your attention to the epistolary nature of this poem. This poem is a love letter to the luna moth, which allows for a specific kind of intimacy that as readers we are privy to primarily as eavesdroppers. I love the epistolary form for how it allows us to get a glimpse of an interaction that is primarily taking place in the speaker’s mind and spirit. Because this is a letter written to an element in the natural world, we are encouraged–and reminded–that the natural world is as worthy a recipient of a love letter as any fellow human.
In this way, the poem also serves as an ode to the luna moth–a poem of praise. In celebrating the luna moth, Honum also paints a fine picture of it. We learn that in addition to having “fine veins” and “maroon margins” on its “broad front wings,” luna moths’ natural enemies are bats, owls, and hornets. In this way, this poem doubles–triples!--as a lesson in learning more about the luna moth, and who doesn’t want to learn more about an insect with such a beautiful name?
Because the poem features and highlights this creature, made so entrancing by Honum’s poem, I am led to do my own independent research on the luna moth. Did you know, for example, that the elongated tails of its hindwings are thought to confuse the echolocation detection used by predatory bats? Furthermore, the luna moth was the first known North American moth to be reported in insect literature, in 1700. 58 years later, the famous biologist and taxonomist Carl Linnaeus named it “Luna,” after the Roman moon goddess, a fact to which Honum alludes when she calls the luna moth “queen” in the very first line.
Back to the speaker herself, who uses this encounter with a luna moth as a way to plumb truths about herself. “Watching you,” she ruminates, “I wonder if writing/and erasing is one of my/creaturely instincts–” and in this way, the speaker has added a further dimension to an epistolary ode–this poem is now an ars poetica as well, a poem on the art of writing poetry. In the luna moth, the speaker glimpses something in herself, too–an instinct to both document, as well as destroy.
I am struck, also, by the personal vulnerability the speaker is able to access in this encounter, specifically in the stanza in which she empathizes with the fact of the luna moth’s enemies–our speaker has her own, “men who lunged at [her] life in both fast and slow motion.” I love this pivot more than I can articulate adequately here–one senses both the wistfulness and resilience from fully-fledged and challenging encounters in the speaker’s life, glimpses we are given a mere acknowledgment of–but enough to fill what is unsaid with our own challenging encounters, while being given a chance to feel empathy for another. The candor here takes my breath away.
I’d like to conclude by returning to Honum’s own origins as someone who grew up in New Zealand but is making her home in Texas. That this poem is written by someone displaced, for whatever reason, makes it that much more poignant to me. To find a friend and comrade in a luna moth makes me think that wherever we are, and whenever, poetry provides a portal for connection, not to mention comradeship.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf 2018) and Seam (SIU 2014). Her writing appears widely both in the United States and abroad and has been translated into several languages. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, three Pushcart prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Arts & Letters, a US Artists Fellowship, and other honors. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of North Texas.https://www.tfaizullah.com/tarfia/
FEATURED POET
Chloe Honum specializes in poetry and creative writing. She is the author of The Tulip-Flame, which was selected by Tracy K. Smith for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize, named a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award, and won a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award and a Texas Institute of Letters Award. She is also the author of a chapbook, Then Winter, and a second full-length collection, The Lantern Room. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, The Yale Review, and The Southern Review, among other journals, and she served as a guest poetry editor for the 2017 Pushcart Prize anthology. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a Sargeson Fellowship. A Kiwi-American, she was raised in Auckland, New Zealand and currently teaches at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Find more at https://www.chloehonum.com/
