A small offering

Another Moon

rises in the same place, clears the same horizon,
trees, barns, dunes, telegraph poles. Some stop
a moment to draw it near, some draw near
to it. The breath slows, the air curries the history
of the wind and all the secret things this moon
ever whispered, or screamed at the top of its arc,
when no one was there to decipher or listen.

I remember when it was much larger, when it
filled the sky and you had to turn your head to
drink it all in. Those were more turbulent times
than these, devoid of the wheel, of technology,
and the invisible atom was yet safely locked up.

One had to seek shelter each night when
the terrors of the darkness moved freely
without challenge, when fire fell from the sky
with regularity, with mystery, and it had yet to be
harnessed to the hand, metaphored into the heart,
worshipped into beautiful and necessary gods.

Another moon rises larger at first and smalls
as it continues into the black spaces that serve
to make illumination what it is. I stop and suss
it in through my mouth in soft steady savors
as if the first might be different from the second,
the second more rare than the first, the thousandth
more tided with the story we have in common.

Another moon asks for what it needs most
and I comply with the few tears I can provide,
hoping that others, that you, might make in this
moment a small offering that she might come home.

Joseph Gallo
February 12, 2006