Poem: Bitten

 

Bitten

 

the moon 

had been bitten down to a nimbus

on a stoic cloud and now 

it was almost an animal

but no one wanted such scars,

and so the moon 

became succulent with wounds

to taunt its critics

and the hypocrties,

 

and it played hourglass

with the calculative schemes 

of our splenetic human rush,

and became 

something to be feared yet prayed,

to be chased after as we overworked and underfed,

lost in our self-made riddles of erosion.

 the moon,

it embraced oceans

until they suckled its silky light.

it became a sickle

for sparkles of heaving midnight harvest.

some say 

it was the first tool, 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 

to stir hope with magic,

and sow various flourishes  

of ineradicable joy.

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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