Eclipse

The sky's dark night face,
The stars at rest behind quickly moving cloud
Keep faith with the patient passing of time;
And the same stars behind a round September moon
Glisten with the long light of the ages.
The shadow of our collective souls
Reaches out over a quarter of a million miles.
Deep and sombre,
Red in the colour of our breath,
The ochre limb begins to creep across the maria,
Hiding crater walls and crater wells.
The hazy terminator grows and fills,
Separates the shadow from normal light,
Bears no relation to the difference we see
Between day and night.
The smoke-red darkness, unrelenting
Moves until what our earthly shadow hides
Is only vaguely present, an intangible ghost.
And, in such a transit, the experience of emptiness
Is subdued by the still passing clouds,
And the night birds which still fly across the place
In which the moon is waiting,
Phantom, unforgotten,
Patient as the sky itself.
Dark, dark, dark,
The waiting and the timelessness weave together
A superstitious, fearful black.
Still dark the wind whips at unseen clouds,
Still, eddies rustle grass stems in the fields,
Dark, we fumble at a pretence of meaning,
Dark, dark, dark,
We can do no more than wait.
The moon, still occulted, leaves only the stars to shine,
The star lit history of the cosmos reaches our dim streets
Lights our worn paths, hears the echoes of our weary feet.
Brief weather lays down wind or rain.
The moon comes home
In accelerated phases:
From crescent to half-gone,
From dark to crescent again,
Half-lit to gibbous.
The earth's reciprocal tide recedes.
Sun revives the dust bowl moon plains,
Temperatures rise to unbearable,
The earth is lit once more,
And the night made whole.
The night's dark sky face,
The cloudscapes' escaping cirrus,
High stratus in a white thin veil,
Lets the moon float through,
The round September moon,
The changeless seasonal moon,
Released from shadow.
The changeless seasonal moon,
Released from shadow:
Full of face, brilliant, reflecting our own sun
And giving the black roads lustre,
Mimicking daylight in uncertain half-tones:
Grey leaves shaking on grey trees,
Under which old, deep shadows lie.

Moon Cycle

Sundown

Star Fields

Sunless

Eclipse

Dead of Night