The Man in The Moon
Drawing the moon in its midway phase,
edging toward its final quarter, with all
of the intricacies of pockmarks, craters
thumb-smudges, blemishes, mare prints:
Nectaris Crisium Tranquilitatis
I saw, in the countenance emerging from
6B scribbles, the patience of an ancient
gardener, like Ted’s from the allotment
by Middlebeck with his miles-away stare
except when he looked at the living soil,
one who tended the dirt, knows full-well
it is originally of the earth, grown out of it
but standing apart in aching separation.
How it once coalesced from the shards
of impact and impregnation to hang
in a moth-like flutter around the flame
of its own making, suspended, watching
in a state of longing to cling to the gravity
of its parent, inheritance, tradition, with
its dark side simmering in the desire
to break free, a repulsion of recognition,
a will to become its own being, but how it
keeps these yin yang drives in balance
upon the Scales of Nightimes, forever
swelling, shrinking through its germination.
Tarnished mirror for our own projections;
like the helplessness of knowing Dad has
taken ill, out of reach in Spanish hands,
we rely for knowledge on refracted light.
How Ted would finger the soil and know
there was a blight, reading how the particles
suffered from a case of collective dementia
and its up to him to coax it back to memory.
Sympathy for the Night
The wind, which has wailed through town
hysterical, rambling about a pandemic,
drops, and the darkness seems to expand
in sound’s absence, as if it squats to rest
from the buffeting, as if it has no
intention of shunting off anywhere soon.
And why would it?
Each day brands the night a vagrant,
shooing it away, kicking it on, clad in
hi-vis vests, helmets, steel capped boots,
with good-riddances and official writs
of ‘Get thee gone’ signed by the Sun;
but for now this night can stake out a plot,
unroll a groundsheet, trace constellations.