The Budding Moon

These poems are based on the Native American Calendar of 13 Moons.

Awaken to the mysterious night.  Silence and darkness as thick as oil.  Oil upon water floats like blankets of clouds.  So the sky rests upon the surface of this sleeping earth.  The Budding Moon arrives. The stillness disturbed by the far off cry of coyotes and the wings of owls.  Death falls by the wayside, life begins again.  My body, a lodge, a sacred place, only my soul haunts.  Unfiltered hallways, shadowy palisades.  In this landscape filled with the light of a thousand luminous stars, the medicine of my ancestors is strong.  I breathe in their breath, dream their dreams, but quietly move on, into turbulent futures of rain, hurricanes, and drought.  Looking down, I see the reflection of cities, lost love, and myriads of lifetimes unfurled like spring blossoms unnoticed.  The great spirit penetrated my routine.  Disturbed the brevity of fragile daylight.  Synchronized the infinite sublime.  Every day, every hour I seek only a clue, only a hint of you.  Overcast, the skies are shallow and amorphous.  The sun and moon speak of a millennia of illumination, melancholy and sadness.  The divine sinks down slowly in an arc, orbiting my consciousness like the sacred planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Venus!  Symbols shrink and recoil, in the pressure of ages, ages of Aquarius, ages of me and you, flashing through fragments of laughter.  Meandering through the jubilance of the miraculous present.  Past disintegrating galaxies, that obliterate and shatter the view, from Hollywood hillsides, I miss you.  Deep city lights, glitter like never before.  In the distance, Appalachia and the red hills absorb all memory.  I flourish in this ghost town, I recall only graveyards, black and white, the pain of a broken heart, and the emptiness that forms a vacuum above this great valley of Jericho.