Our recent full moon of January 26th is called a "Wolf Moon" in the legacy of northern and eastern tribes of the Algonquin and Iroquois nations. In cold mid-winter snows, wolves roam the landscape in search of food.
No wolves are seen around here but the moon still rises bright, clear, and crisp over buildings put up to house the waves of immigrants of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: these are the buildings we refer to as tenements.
Jamaican-born poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Claude McKay (1889 - 1948), was inspired by the sight of moonlight over the tenements.
"Upon the clothes behind the tenements,
That hang like ghosts suspended from the lines,
Linking each flat,but to each indifferent,
Incongruous and strange the moonlight shines."
A Song of the Moon
Claude McKay
The use of the clothes drier and concerns for tenant safety have brought the sight of laundry lines to an end in most big cities; but the moon still shines upon the tenements and, in places far away, families of wolves are searching for sustenance.
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