In the service of poetry

I got up in the middle of the night to look at the eclipse of the moon.
The last full lunar eclipse I saw was when I was eight,
keen on astronomy, and liked to lie down in the grass
with my little tripod and mariner's telescope.

66 years later I wanted to write a poem about the blood-moon,
and a river of dark bloody moonlight streaming over the world -
or something in that rather unsubtle vein.
What I saw - this time through cheap binoculars -
was a moon the colour of an old earthenware pot,
not even coppery. But
I was out on the balcony as wisps of mist rose up from the lake,
an owl hooted back and forth over the forest, and bats flittered by.
I watched for an hour.  I should have put on a pullover
and not stood half-naked gazing with weak eyes up at the sky.

photo taken with cheap camera