Sometimes I am stuck looking in one direction. It is more convenient, comfortable, and safe to await the same moon. But as I age, I am more and more thankful for the phases - and the hope of rolling over.
This poem was published last week in The Way Back to Ourselves Fall Journal - a tribute to “The Peace of Wild Things” by Wendell Berry. It is a beautiful collection.
Link: WBTO Fall Collection
A New Moon The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, and expressionless. Ray Bradbury Before, she only slept eastward so dawn’s foreseen light flickered through the leaves freckling her face and what lay behind, the past, and all that followed, lolled suspended in the hollow of nightfall— despite the day, shadows hid her open pores, cell-bound graves unsteamed, clogged in oily stores of rotated hours, her joy buried in the waning— until one day’s dusk the new moon’s gentle ghost whispered in evening’s clouds, its breath dampening her skin, loosening the fissures of dried flakes in a wash of warmth— and she rolled over, smoothing her cratered bed and faced the phases of all that followed from the east and the west.