Poetry for the Esbat: Maybe Moon, 2014

XVII: The Moon (& others) from The Lost Tarot of Nostradamus,
by John Matthews & Wil Kinghan.
This is a curious deck which significantly, contains a Suit of Moons.

Maybe it is, Maybe it isn't.


Llewellyn calls it the Wind Moon. 
That makes sense in our desert bioregion...

Here in indecisive Alaska, it seems it might be the Soggy-Except-When-I-Think-I-Might-Snow-Again Moon. Is it Spring yet? Maybe. Maybe we will just call this the Maybe Moon.

A Witch told me that he heard from another Witch who said she heard it from some other Witches who heard it somewhere out in the world that this Moon is very significant to those who believe in the merits of certain ancient prophecies. This was news to me. I am told they call it the Blood Moon & that this is the first of four which are indicative of the END. Or something. Maybe.

Nevermind that this has happened before with no noticeable effects. But, let the dooms-dayers believe what they want to believe... after all, I choose to worship the Moon & Night & Her children among Others & isn't that just kooky too...

And I prefer to put my stock in the prophecies of science fiction writers who, it appears, thus far have the better record. Too bad.

So while we humans are all predicting the END, or not. I will share an incredible piece of poetry written by Welshman Mark Tredinnick. Tredinnick is a former lawyer & book editor who holds both an MBA and a PhD from the University of Western Sydney’s School of Social Ecology as well as numerous awards for his poetry. He is a founder of ASLE-ANZ, the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment & spends much of his writing time exploring "the attachment to place as well as the intrinsic qualities of landscape."

I have had this piece saved in my Poetry Foundation app (yes, I have an app for reading poetry, on a phone, which is all SO terribly sci-fi...) for over a year now. I read it from time to time, but it is a bit hard on my feelers. This is a challenging piece. This is an extraordinary piece. This seems to me to be the most appropriate response to this first Blood Moon & this stuff about the END that I could ever conjure. So here it is.



Red Moon Eclogues by Mark Tredinnick


I
Every year the moon inches away from us. In time she’ll swim too far out
to anchor us at our habitual angle to the sun, and that will be the end
of the well-tempered and recursive wildness
                                                             that conceived and suffered us,
and that will be the end of us. We have just two
billion years to thank her for our time here. Eternity has a use-by date

II
But it’ll be up long before that, and in the meantime,
I sit on the cold step of the cowshed and watch the world throw its shadow
on the moon like a horseblanket;
                                                             in the meantime the moon reddens
in the refraction of all our dawns and sunsets, in a kind of transfigured cosmic
smog. An apocalypse that lasts three hours until it’s time to go to bed.

III
And in the meantime on the floor of my shed, blue planets sing in the hands
of children as they once sang in war. Two small worlds forged to cry terribly down
like creation unravelling upon one’s foes now
                                                               make a peaceful clangour on my secular desk.
One spins from its orbit and quakes and chips its cerulean shell on the floor
of heaven. The tectonics of play. We are loved like this, and this is how it ends.

IV
I’m arguing a lot with death these days. And last night I found myself
in court poised to clinch the case against the absurdity of life.
Certainly, this was sleeping and certainly
                                                            I was dreaming and I’d been losing the thread,
but all at once I saw where my argument must run, and I was running it there
when my small boy cried and woke me and I went to him and now I’ll never know.

V
Spring now, and the river has drawn back her bow. The lark ascends
from the cd-player, and black ducks sip brown ditchwater in the yard.
Everything’s in bud or leaf, last of all
                                                              the silver poplars and the Osage Orange,
trees flaring even now in the backyard of the childhood of my friend, the poet,
the poet’s son. The world happens twice. Draw the linen string taut and shoot.

VI
One lives in paradox. Debussy plays; trucks flounder past like gods
who’ve lost control of their machines. In between one makes one’s life up.
The sound is the price you pay for the sight
                                                             that meets you every morning and half
of what you paid for the house. The shed puts the perfect sky in her pocket,
and possums rut in the roof. Eternity is in rehearsal, and this is its soundtrack.

VII
Brad mows an acre an hour. A general at ease on his machine, a banker
in overalls, he’s rationalised our small republic on one tank of gas. And this now—
cutgrass at four o’clock—is how
                                                              hope smells. Some days I can see no way out:
the body of the world in entropy. But today I sit among the ruins
of the afternoon, and I cannot see how it can’t all go on forever.

VIII
Meantime the moon has made herself new again, and there has been rain.
The Marulan hills, which had almost forgotten the taste of the word,
are spelling green again this afternoon,
                                                             and there’s water in a lake that’s been a paddock
for a decade. Three black cockatoos, and then three more, fly over as I take
the southwest road. And into all this panoply of hope, the new moon falls.

Blessings to you this Esbat, my friends.