Meditation on a Moon Pie

Great romances and dizzying cathedrals
aren’t the only things you get nostalgic for.
Just now I got that feeling,
a torn curtain dropping behind my eyes,
not from an old song but from a moon pie.

A moon pie in a cardboard display box.

Yeah, sing O Muse, of the dear lost days beyond recall,
the days of looking forward,
our summer house at Nag’s Head,
and the Great Moon Pie Mystery.

We brought a box of them as a joke,
and every morning one would disappear from its box
to be found the next day,
in some attitude of distress
(transfixed with a toy sword to a sand dune,
suspended by a string like the Sybil in her jar).

We figured it out in the end, who was doing it,
but first we launched an Inquisition.

Splendid, the imagination, don’t you think,
if it can pluck a story out of nothing,
make a plot out of a few wet grain of sands on a doorstep?

But even the imagination can’t bring back the past:
so, even the trivial things,
the moon pies no one would ever eat,
the paper doily by the bedside,
the children’s toy swords, become precious,
the most expensive things.

A moon pie, melted on a paper plate,
will last practically forever (I can assure you of this) –

But practically forever is nothing, really,
and so we can only trust that somehow God holds it all,
even the most foolish of things,
in the palm of his hand.

Rebecca Bratten Weiss is a wife, mother, thinker of deep thoughts, and Adjunct Instructor of English, Philosophy, and Honors, at the Franciscan University of Steubenville. She writes from her farm near Hopedale, Ohio. The accompanying video clip is a live performance of NRBQ at the Ram's Head Tavern in Annapolis, Maryland, on November 20, 2012.