Poem: Bitten

 

Bitten

 

the moon 

had been bitten down to a nimbus on

a stoic cloud and now 

it was almost an animal and yet 

no one wanted such scars,

and so the moon,

succulent from ancient battles,

taunted its critics

and all the hypocrites as it 

played hourglass

to the calculative schemes 

of the splenetic human rush,

and so it became 

something to be feared and yet prayed,

to be chased after by us flawed dreamers 

as we overworked and hardly fed,

lost in our self-made riddles of erosion.

 

the moon, 

it embraced the ocean of a poet's heart,

until it suckled the silky light and became 

a sickle for sparkles of heaving midnight harvest.

some say the moon

was the first tool, far before stone,

before pestle, before weapon,

 and that it was once mistaken for 

the eye of a great bird,

high over mountainous hearts,

where 

it somersaulted and pranced, 

stirring hope with magic

while it sowed various flourishes  

of ineradicable joy.

==============================================

4/9/26

3/15.25 ... brutal poem, hard to work at all

6/21/24 solsticed

11/13... changed the "sickle" phrase

11/10  more edits, hoping for excellence through neurotic fixation

11/6   ... "played" replaces "it was the".   Fixed typo in second-to-last stanza