How a Luna Moth Grows Up—Adam Whipple (Poetry Prism Contest, First Place)

“How a Luna Moth Grows Up” is the first-place winner in our Rabbit Room Poetry Prism Contest! We’re so grateful to everyone who submitted and shared their work with us. We’ll be posting the winning poems here over the next few weeks.

By Adam Whipple

They, that is to say, the hospice nurses,

say you stop eating in the end, which I guess

makes sense, although that’s a zoologist’s measure

by which luna moths are judged to be adults.

With no mouths to speak of, late they rise

somewhere between a blue and a green, banners

blazing like seraphim full of eyes

intent on finding each other, nothing more,

among the mint, amid the damp osiers.

Everyone I know has wondered when

they’ll cease to feel like children, but perhaps

the nurses will tell someday when they have seen

far too often the great, bedridden fast

their patients entered upon. They will tell how

we lifted, at once perplexed, from our cots

to realize what we had always known,

blue as mint in a certain light, purposed

at last only upon a mighty togetherness.

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Adam Whipple is a musician, poet, and author living in Knoxville, Tennessee, and a graduate of Carson-Newman University. His essays and poetry have appeared in Curator Magazine, Blue Mountain Review, The Pigeon Parade Quarterly, and Analogue. His albums can be found on all major digital outlets.