Cloudy night

 

Behind

the cloud veil hangs

a solstice moon, taunting

the darkness, herding stars in night’s

pastures.

Silvering

 

after the rain the moon

like sand settling

silver

in animal pelts

half-shadows

half grainy movement.

I sift the grains

the crosshatched trees

for the magical hare

in the pooled darkness

of these shifting seas

but the night closes

after the rain

full of moon-wash

silvering

my elusive wilderness.

Tanka for the solstice

A first solstice tanka for Frank Tassone’s haikai prompt. I’m sure there will be more.

 

world holds its breath

plunging deeper into dark

sky water the moon

full-bellied as new year rolls

growing richer bringing spring

The moon in the night garden

I’ve been thinking about my mother a lot recently. It would have been her birthday a few days ago. The Oracle knows. She presented me with the line: ‘I never need my mother’ in its entirety.

 

Love runs over,

a spring of sweet water.

I never need my mother,

not now that she has become the moon

and fills the sky with beauty.

She watches

and shows me how life sings

in the sleeping night garden.

 

 

Moon-feathered song

A tritina for a wonderful day!

 

On the right side of the moon the darkness falls,

the left, a goddess smile of echoed light

born on wings of owl and fluted song.

 

Starlight glitters, night leaves, while the song

of brown birds charms, whatever else befalls

this world of feathers soft and silver light.

 

Morning fills the sky with golden light,

sunrise whispers silver streams of song,

winding twisted tresses where it falls.

 

Feathered moon falls, light and gentle as a whispered song.

Microfiction #Writephoto: Tattered Moon

For Sue Vincent’s photo prompt.

Once, they said, the moon was round and glowed like a pale sun, casting soft grey shadows on the grass. Once, the moon was fat-bellied like a pregnant woman, and shone with the same splendour. Once the tides rolled waves up the strand to the dunes, then drew them back to leave a mirror, bright as pewter. That was then, long ago, in the times before.

Now, there is no grass, there are no tides, no seas.

Now the moon hangs by a thread, stubborn and obtuse, from the same star. She neither rises nor sets, grows neither fat nor thin. She no longer commands the tides and the cycles of the earth. The moon is a crescent, a bitten apple, broken and defiled by our constant warring.

But though the stars have drawn away and left the once blue planet to her solitary wanderings, the moon remains, obstinately clinging to an invisible thread. She hangs like a ragged target, pocked and splintered by shot, a living reproach.

When the children stand at the edge of the great gulf that was once an ocean and point at the battered sign in the sky, they know, though no one has ever told them, who was Moon, and why. And they feel deep down in their hearts a restless anger that they have been deprived of all the earth’s beauty. They bend down to fill their hands with blackened grit, and search for signs of life.

One day, one of them will find a seed, a fragment, and plant it in a ray of broken moonlight, and the revolution will begin.

Haiku challenge: Darkness & Deep

Who couldn’t write poetry to those two words? A trio of haiku for Ronovan’s weekly prompt.

Deep water rolls green

and cold among moonlight pearls—

darkness crowds the sky.

 

Deep the river runs,

carries broken things seaward,

into the darkness.

 

Darkness falls again,

winter cold and deep, sinking

like the waning moon.

Black pearls and moonlight

Twitter poems from yesterday’s prompts.

All tears are black

for sorrow is dark

and wells from the places

where no light falls.

 

Black pearls

are as rare as moonstones

and sundew

and starfish

that light the deeps of the ocean

with drops of pearl moonlight.

 

Gulls soar to the moon and back,

dusted with silver

and the grey of dead stars.

Their eyes full of worlds

we will never know,

their call, the voices of the dead.

 

Sun breaks on gleaming waters,

star-speckled,

moon-struck,

a hoard of light.

If my hands could hold it,

I would give it all to you.

 

At the epicentre of all worlds

is a heart that beats and throbs

in time to the wings of love,

the song of the turtle dove.

Moon music and secrets

Today’s magnet poems came one from each of the Poet, Nature and Original word sets.

 

Cry in the wind,

black tears for lost love.

Moon in shadow sleeps,

her music stilled—

not a thousand years enough

to smooth away the ache.

 

 

Earth is berry-bright

in a harmony of greens—

the dark cycle’s over.

Listen to the fullness grow,

at dusk fall,

when light rain murmurs

its sweet, gentle song.

 

 

Ask me never

my secrets.

We two share

one heart—

your joy is mine.

 

 

Moon obscured

Today is the first day of NaPoWriMo, and I’m revisiting the triolet, a form I’ve rather neglected lately in favour of its more expansive relative, the villanelle.

The night is heavy now, the moon obscured,

And all the stars are stilled, silent their song.

Have all the night birds gone, by foxes lured?

The night is heavy now, the moon obscured,

Heartache returns though I’ve long thought it cured,

A night like this you left. It’s been so long,

The night is heavy now, the moon obscured,

And all the stars are stilled, silent their song.