One of the most magically beautiful moments of my life came while I was living on Molokai, a lesser known Hawaiian island that has very little light pollution due to its low population. You can see all the stars and the moon is very bright there. I was training for the Honolulu Marathon, which starts at 5:00am, so I started a long run at 5:00am one day. It was still dark as night when I started running and it began to rain lightly. As I ran along a straight road, hoping that it wouldn’t rain for all of the next 4 hours of my run, I saw what looked like a funny shaped cloud. It was almost rectangular, and was going sort of diagonal in the sky. It was whitish and bluish. And then it got bigger and bigger until I recognized it for what it was—a rainbow. A rainbow in the middle of the night made with moonlight instead of sunlight. I looked behind me and there was a full moon, low on the horizon. I looked in front of me and saw a half a rainbow now and watched it as it grew to a large half circle.
I wanted to run around and tell everyone, but everyone was asleep. So I just enjoyed it. A magical moment where I felt like the universe was smiling right straight at only me.
I looked it up later and confirmed that night rainbow, or moonbows, do exist. I read a naval officer’s account of one and one of his phrases stuck with me as it mirrored my experience. He wrote, “Its beauty will haunt me for the rest of my days.”
I wrote this poem about it.
the haunt
You cannot hunt the haunt.
The haunt hunts you.
It sees you now, as I speak.
As I speak, it lurks.
It waits.
It stops.
It waits.
You forget that it is there.
You look away,
It looks inside.
It’s been inside your house while you were away,
and it didn’t feed your fish.
It opened your fridge and ate a nectarine,
an unripe nectarine, and spat it out,
leaving you one unripened nectarine and one unopened fridge.
It left minutes before you came home, casually,
and it is still waiting for you to come home.
You are home, you say, but a house without a haunt is no home.
Trees do not always make a forest.
Your house is a potato without salt.
No one has ever eaten a potato without salt.
You are not home.
You are a tourist, a rookie, a day trip
with shorts, sandals, and a belt tucking in a plaid shirt
that tells us you don’t have a favorite color—
Your legs are as white as your socks.
You are not home in Hawai’i.
In Hawai’i, it rains.
You have sunscreen on.
It is sunny and it is dark in the same day,
the day that clouds the ripening sun
from the nectarine sitting in the darkness of your cold, unopened fridge.
The clouds move.
The mist remains.
A door opens.
You have stood on this road every day for a year
and never seen the moon through the clouds.
But today—is there any other day?
Today
Tonight
the moon moves through the clouds
today you see the moon in the clouds
you see the moon’s light in the monstrous misty rainbow before you
and now the moonlit mist is in you,
instantly forever
the magical Molokai moonbow
the most memorable moving moment Mitch has ever met
is much too much more than enough
it is the cherry on the sprinkles on the icing on the cake
which followed a free dinner and a perfectly full day
it is more than two eyes can bear
it dumbfounded, dumblost,
dumb won, dumb dominated
a damp dimless dimwit
dead in his tracks
born on the road
in the middle of the night
as if the whole strange beautiful world had just smiled in his direction
and asked him if he wanted something to drink
he couldn’t think
of answer so he borrowed a phrase from a friend
who speaks more eloquently than he on matters like these,
on unforgettably sweet things like perfectly ripe nectarines:
“Its beauty will haunt me for the rest of my days.”
Did you say that it will haunt you?
Welcome home.
Acknowledgments
“Its beauty will haunt me for the rest of my days.”
—V. E. Mikkelson, MD (on seeing a moonbow)