Poem: Bitten

 

Bitten

 

the moon had been bitten,

down into a nimbus

on a stoic cloud.

 

it was almost an animal, then,

but no one wanted such scars,

and so the moon 

became succulent with wounds

to taunt such critics

and the hypocrties,

 

it

 

played hourglass

to the calculative schemes 

of the splenetic human rush.

it was something to be feared yet prayed,

chasing us as we overworked and underfed,

lost in our self-made riddles of delusion.

 

the moon

 

embraced the oceans

till they suckled its silky light;

and it became the sickle

of their heaving sparkling midnight harvests.

the moon,

some say 

it was the first stone employed as a tool,

before pestle, before weapon,

 

and that it was mistaken, once, as the eye of a great bird,

high over mountainous hearts,

where it somersaulted to stir hope with magic,

mixtures of ineradicable joy,

breaths of possibility.

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

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