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 those who hid as it 

played hourglass

to the splenetic schemes 

of the hungry human rush;

and so it became 

something to be feared yet prayed,

to be chased after by flawed dreamers

who overworked and hardly fed,

lost in their self-made riddles of erosion.

 

the moon, 

it embraced the poetry of the harvest,

and savored the silky light of sparkled words 

which sickled a heaving midnight ocean. 

some say 

it 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, and sowing flourishes  

of ineradicable joy.

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5/26 ... unsolvable

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