Moon Moth
I made my home
on a broken world
that I found in the space
between breaths,
golden dark as your eyes
long ago
fireflies, quenched moons
yellow with light in
the river mist.
Time crawled out
on my veins
like an inchworm and hung,
a floating cocoon
spun from brown autumn's dust.
One dream
in a decade kept a blind sun's vigil
on the soft shape within, and
time's opalescent shell
pledged a constancy malleable
to the formless thing
growing her wings.
All this while
I wandered as a wind
in the tree of bound hours,
up and down, warm
in your scent of basil and chai
til the years at last
became harder
than miles
til the earth became still
till the flowers sighed,
waiting for time
to fall or fly.
~February 2020
posted for earthweal's challenge
Brendan asks us to look at time, the natural world, and many other things this week, out of which I chose : "What happened to time? Spin the clockfaces crazily and get a feel for a present both timesick and solastalgic."
Images: Moth Wing ©Amelia Fletcher Fair Use
The Lonely Cedar, 1907 ©Tivadar Koszta Csontvary Public Domain
Those last three stanzas flow so easily, and are so marvelous, that I know that you probably had to work harder on those, than any of the rest of it. Somehow, the easier it reads, the harder it was to write, or so I find. Thank you for laboring in the literary salt mines so that we could enjoy the winged creature ypu brought forth. ;-)
ReplyDeleteThis is a wonderful and sad tribute to the change will come to every one of us. Especially love how you closed the poem with the things still to come.
ReplyDeleteTime is felt strongest when you are waiting for the inevitable
Sigh. So lovely, "quenched moons yellow with light in the river mist." Time climbing and hung like a cocoon is an amazing concept......"I wandered as a wind in the tree of bound hours" took my breath away, as did your closing stanza. It is so lovely to be reading you again, Joy. A gift.
ReplyDeleteI read it as heart-time, fragile and gossamer and not much seen by day -- like a rare moth -- which one weaves a certain home from -- a broken one here, "in the space / between breaths." It takes shape so slowly -- "One dream / in a decade" -- and grows to a fullness which, so paradoxically, is the end. So delicately whispered here, culminating with a world uncertain it or we will survive. Stellar. - Brendan
ReplyDelete"Time crawled out
ReplyDeleteon my veins
like an inchworm"
and hung for decades! Time plays me in all the spaces of your poem, until:
"the years at last
became harder
than miles"
I feel a witness to the ending where, no doubt, something will fly when most falls. I'm awed by how time and space cross here in the smallest of lives and the entirety of existence.
There is so much music in this, that recurring "il".....while, vigil, basil, flies, miles...it is a pleasure t read...JIM
ReplyDelete