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The Morning Porch

Daily short takes from an Appalachian hollow

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moon

November 3, 2021 by Dave Bonta

First frost, and the thinnest small boat of a moon riding low on the horizon with the bright darkness of its cargo.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags dawn, frost, moon 4 Comments
November 1, 2021 by Dave Bonta

They’re shapeshifting daily now, the faces in the thinning treetops silhouetted against the dawn sky. I push my glasses down to unblur the moon.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags dawn, fall foliage, moon
October 25, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Gibbous moon overhead through a thin veil of fog. A breeze moves through the forest, liberating the night’s rain.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags fog, moon, rain, wind
October 1, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Cold and clear. Stars fade as the ground fog grows, partly lit by the crescent moon, partly by the dawn.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags dawn, fog, moon, stars
September 25, 2021 by Dave Bonta

The unfamiliar clouds of my breath. A phoebe calling in the sun-drenched crown of a walnut tree, beneath that old slice of apple, the moon.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags black walnut, moon, phoebe
September 20, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Spring peeper just after moonset. Then whippoorwill. Wood thrush. Carolina wren. Phoebe. A pileated woodpecker cackles and it’s day.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags Carolina wren, dawn, moon, pileated woodpecker, whippoorwill, wood thrush
September 6, 2021 by Dave Bonta

In the dark of the moon, the luminance of stars. From town, a wailing of fire sirens, their literally compelling music an eerie, out-of-sync duet.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags moon, stars
September 3, 2021 by Dave Bonta

5:58 am. The crescent moon is increasingly alone in the sky as the dawn light metastasizes. A distant whippoorwill.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags dawn, moon, whippoorwill
August 26, 2021 by Dave Bonta

Ten minutes till sunrise. The gibbous moon is losing its glow like a guitar pick thrown from a stage.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags moon, sunrise
August 23, 2021 by Dave Bonta

The meadow and its crickets. The full moon emerges from the clouds upside-down in every drop of dew.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags crickets, moon
August 22, 2021 by Dave Bonta

A few minutes after moonset, and the ground fog is still aglow. A screech owl’s monotone trill.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags fog, moon, screech owl 1 Comment
August 5, 2021 by Dave Bonta

5:15. A sliver of a moon with its dark bulk faintly illuminated by earthshine. Highway noise picks up. A towhee starts to tweet.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags I-99, moon, towhee
August 3, 2021 by Dave Bonta

5:15. The crescent moon’s parenthesis gapes at Pleiades, which I watch until it’s subsumed into the dawn.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags dawn, moon
July 26, 2021 by Dave Bonta

5:15. The moon through thin clouds. A whip-poor-will’s distant chant. 9:15. The sun through thin clouds. A hummingbird’s mid-air defecation.

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Categories Plummer's Hollow Tags moon, ruby-throated hummingbird, whip-poor-will
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On This Day

  • April 16, 2025
    A cold wind rummaging through the forest, mixing up the sounds of crows and trains and sirens. The sun appears for a second or two…
  • April 16, 2024
    In the last few minutes before the sun crests the ridge, ghosts lingering among the trees turn back into blossoming shadbush. A chickadee is singing…
  • April 16, 2023
    Sun glimmering through fog as wild turkeys whine and gobble, mourning doves moan, and a red-winged blackbird sings in the marsh.
  • April 16, 2022
    Rainy, breezy and intermittently bright. The zigzag flight of a phoebe finding breakfast above the daffodils.
  • April 16, 2021
    The last to shed leaves in the fall is the first to regrow them: sprawling lilac with green tongues just long enough to catch drops…

See all...

Related book

Cover of Ice Mountain with a linocut of a big ridgetop tree.

What I do after I sit on the porch. One winter and spring's daily walks distilled into short poems with linocut illustrations by Beth Adams.

Header image: detail from Paper Garden by Clive Hicks-Jenkins (used by permission)

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