The Rooting Moon

Would you like to swing on a star
carry moonbeams home in a jar
and be better off than you are
or would you rather be a pig?

Would You Like To Swing On A Star?, composed by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke (1944).

No contest here, the pig is the obvious choice and be damned those muddy and disgraceful shoes. Star swinging and moon jumping probably don’t bring pigs to everyone’s mind, but adding a new sobriquet to March’s full moon might get some folks putting pig and moon together.

In the N.E. United States, the March full moon is also called the “Worm Moon” or the “Sap Moon.” The ground temperature has risen enough by March that worms are coaxed from their deep winter burrows and their castings (as well as hungry Robins) begin to appear in fields, yards and woodlands. March’s warmer days and still cold nights also gets the sap flowing in Sugar Maple trees and maple syrup processing is now underway.

This year’s March full moon occurred on the 16th. And since the 1st of March is our traditional National Pig Day, I propose the March full moon also be considered the “Rooting Moon.” March is also the first month after winter where the earth has thawed enough for outdoor pigs to begin truly rooting about and maybe gobbling up some of those early worms.

Additional information:

• The great classic “Swinging on a Star” sung by Bing Crosby.
• Cartoonist, J.C. Duffy, sorts out the difference between a pig on the moon cavorting in very low gravity and an actual flying pig.
• Artist and poet, Pamela Selin-Palmer, also a good pal here at Porkopolis, writes about pigs and men and moons in “Man Missing His Moon” from The Love Poems of Honniker Winkley.

From the Porkopolis Archive:

• Artist Tammy Mae Moon’s pastel of “Circe offering her potion” is on view in the Porkopolis Art Museum.
• A boar comes out of the West and roots the sun and moon and more in this W.B.Yeats poem “He Mourns for the Change…”
• Poet, Denise Levertov says the moon is a sow in “Song for Ishtar”
• In “The Silver-fanged Boar” Romanian poet, Stefan Augustin Doinas, tells us how the moon sparkles like fangs of a boar.