Category Archives: Moon Poem

The Blues by Amit Parmessur

The Blues

by Amit Parmessur

 

Around blue, white oceans,
in a blue and black house dwells a black
speck. So black, so blue
black alive, emotionally blue.

Sometimes like a fresh road, after the rain,
spellbinding every periwinkle and
sometimes imitating a baffled bluebird

he has had the blues so, so often that
he never listens to the blues and
his eyes have long gone into his
socks that smell of cheap cigarettes.

On his neighbors lips are perched
black curses that threaten to recreate
him every day, and his disloyal wife’s
hair flies in the wind in such a way
that she might inspire him into frothing
himself off some mossy cliff, any time
on one of those moonlit, blue nights.

He’ll never understand that he’s
the symbol of a country losing itself
because of people like him.

###

Born in 1983, Amit Parmessur lives with his black cat nowadays. Since 2010, his poems have appeared in more than 100 literary magazines. His book on blog Lord Shiva and other poems has also been published by The Camel Saloon. He is nominated for the Pushcart Award and lives in Quatre-Bornes, Mauritius. As long as he gets published, he knows he is on the right track.

 

She by Camryn Barganier

She

by Camryn Barganier

Ice cream is for grown ups
And love is for lesbians.
She was ice cream
Warmed by the forgotten time of deep kisses
The flavor of the week
And I wanted to spoon her.

Mrs. Cherry Garcia.
She was tasteful?
And carefree
Dripping down my waffle cones
I wanted to catch her with my tongue.
And become Mrs. And Mrs. Cherry Garcia
She was the reason I turned my cup over after the last drop,
Just hoping she would give me more.
See she, was the cause of my melting core
The hello, goodbye and waiting kiss at the door
And she swore,
My eyes twinkled.
She said, when I laughed,
My nose crinkled
She noticed the little things, big things, and gave attention to all things.

She melted through my fingertips
And my hands stuttered and babbled
Aimlessly the first time around.
I had secrets climbing on my earlobes
But my lips only shared them with her.
And goose bumps upon my collar bone
Like children
Balancing on a log
But I was no child.
She invaded
And I surrendered
And we played the lovers game
For months behind closed doors
And lived on lying lips
That told love stories over ice cream sundaes
We were Juliet and Juliet
Forbidden and in love.

We were beautiful
She made me snap, crackle and pop
First and last
Every time
And then,
She would chuckle
As I morphed back into childhood
Curled into myself
Like two lips with a secret moon behind them.
She caressed my hair.
And right then I should have said,
I don’t care what they say.
I should have told her then
Because I had her
Melting in my fingertips
I was there,
I was in love.
But I didn’t
And she got tired of waiting
On my fear to flee
But my female intuition said
You have something to lose.
And so, she was lost.
My Ice cream melted away.

###
Camryn Barganier was raised in Houston, Texas by her parents Doris Forte and Art Barganier. At a young age, she discovered her passion in many art forms, especially performing arts and writing. By the age of fourteen, she began performing spoken word poetry and studying her true passion. After graduating from the University of Houston with a bachelor?s degree in broadcast journalism, she continued her writing career in television and radio. Since 2006, she has been an administrator for Be A Champion, Inc., a non-profit organization providing after school enrichment and tutorial programs in the Houston area.

As a bilingual English and Spanish performer, writer and presenter, Barganier works with children in her daily life, reinforcing positive self-expression through art and creative writing. She continues to spread the importance of knowledge about the effects of domestic violence through her Stop Shops, the practicum concept behind her book, Squeaky Speaks. Since the age of 12, she has been performing spoken word poetry nationwide, and in 2009 she qualified for the National Poetry Slam Competition.

These seminars focus on the elements of play therapy, the natural and familiar form of positive self-expression for children. Her passion for stopping the cycle of domestic violence drives her career, aspirations and art. Barganier lives in Houston, Texas with her dog, Winston, the inspiration for the pet in her book.

Things we know by Dave Margoshes

Things we know

by Dave Margoshes

Everybody knows the man in the moon
is blue cheese, that dogs keep the sun at bay
in winter, that fireflies are the souls
of the dearly departed, flickering through
the transparent evening for honey. We know
the danger of the frozen swing to the tongue,
the heartbreak of the grosbeak legging it north
in early spring drunk on forgotten apples, we’ve all
heard our mothers’ admonitions
about clean underwear and dirty thoughts, there’s
no shortage of certainty and conviction. Still,
when you turn to me as you do now, I hesitate,
all that gossamer wisdom no help at all,
no damned help at all.

###
Dave Margoshes is a Saskatchewan writer whose stories and poems have appeared widely in Canadian literary magazines and anthologies. He’s published over a dozen books, including five collections of poetry  the most recent, Dimensions of an Orchard, won the Anne Szumigalski Poetry Prize at the 2010 Saskatchewan Book Awards. His new story collection, A Book of Great Worth, is being published in April 2012.

Child Among Metal Sculptures by DWE Scott

Child Among Metal Sculptures

by DWE Scott

Roll the metal sculptures out;
Shake out their gnarled limbs;
Loosen their terrible torsos;
Let the air be filled with horrible clankings;
Let it grow rank with sulphur smells
And be splattered with blue bruises and yellow flames.

True they scare the children,
But the tortured faces are necessary I’m afraid
And digestible if spied from the laced shadows
Under the trees of a bright afternoon.

Unfold your hand dear one
And you will find in it the curled nature of all beginnings,
Pink and shy,
Longing, perhaps, for the absence of light.
The boy’s copper hair is like a mist covered sun,
Such a bold red to be exhibited before these consuming engines.
Keep him back here, behind us,
Where his eyes, round as moons,
Can examine the grass and bits of stick, his playthings.

Ours are gone now,
But this boy, see how grave he is, see his pale, shining skin.
No human heart can resist him,
None can avoid becoming victims of his loveliness, his beauty.

###

I live in Winnipeg, Manitoba in the same house I have been living in for thirty years. I am married with grown children. I paint and write short stories as well as write poetry.

I publish a blog – www.storiesdwescott.blogspot .com

Poem Found in a Wood by Ian Dudley

Poem Found in a Wood

by Ian Dudley

the low sun turns puddles
into sheets of sky indigo
where the moon gathers its white
and the custard and blood leaves
of a cherry tree dying
remember light

a pheasant puts its sore throat
to a trumpet a white-tipped propeller
whirls into the trees
cachinnating like a magpie
the wood fills up with roosting
a path polka-ed

with gold leaf
and blackened pennies
leads me to a mother with two kids
why do we have to go into the woods
the boy says I don’t hear the reply
because someone

is following me
the moon hardens into a netsuke
my dog races between the trees
trapped in a zoetrope
I forgot my notebook
and have to write on my skin

The Poet and the Lily by A. B. S. Tennyson

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The Poet and the Lily by A. B. S. Tennyson

A poet was born in a modern time,
‘Neath Saturn and his Rings,
He was a child of the world’s prime,
Knew all beautiful things.
He was a child of morning and mirth,
Laughing for joy of the sun,
His nostrils drank the scent of earth
When rain is over and done.

A lily came from the winter’s womb
And grew in its own sweet pride,
But the ruthless steel passed over its bloom,
And low in the dust it died.
And the poet’s heart was filled with pain
That a delicate thing and rare
Should be reft of the beauty of which it was fain
And killed by the cruel share.

So he sang of the meadows white with lambs,
And life all young again,
Of the colts which gallop to their dams,
Knowing not any rein.
He sang of the spring upon the sea,
Hedges all white with may,

The year in its sweet infancy,
This our great world at play.
Of shepherds piping to their flocks
Across the fields of thyme,
Of sunlit fields above the rocks,
Where the small waves lap in rhyme.
Of glancing maids and youths their peers,
For ever young and free,
With faces fair, and in their ears
Great music of the sea.

He sang the amber moon a-sail
In an even of misty blue,
The stars which burn, the stars which pale,
The might which holds them true;
The comets in another sky
Which sweep to an unknown morn.
He sang of some vast agony
Or ever a world was born.

He sang a song like a twanging bow,
His head was full of sound
As a dark night when winds are low
And a swell comes from the ground.
He sang a song like a joyous bird
In wooded places and hilly,
While in the hearts of those that heard
Pity grew like a lily.

The Dream by Edna St. Vincent Millay

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Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892?1950)

The Dream

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love, if I weep it will not matter,
And if you laugh I shall not care;
Foolish am I to think about it,
But it is good to feel you there.
Love, in my sleep I dreamed of waking,
White and awful the moonlight reached
Over the floor, and somewhere, somewhere,
There was a shutter loose, it screeched!
Swung in the wind, and no wind blowing!
I was afraid, and turned to you,
Put out my hand to you for comfort,
And you were gone! Cold, cold as dew,
Under my hand the moonlight lay!
Love, if you laugh I shall not care,
But if I weep it will not matter,
Ah, it is good to feel you there!

Old Tunes by Sara Teasdale

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Sara Teasdale by Arnold Genthe from the Library of Congress

Old Tunes by Sara Teasdale

As the waves of perfume, heliotrope, rose,
Float in the garden when no wind blows,
Come to us, go from us, whence no one knows;

So the old tunes float in my mind,
And go from me leaving no trace behind,
Like fragrance borne on the hush of the wind.

But in the instant the airs remain
I know the laughter and the pain
Of times that will not come again.

I try to catch at many a tune
Like petals of light fallen from the moon,
Broken and bright on a dark lagoon,

But they float away for who can hold
Youth, or perfume or the moon’s gold

The Sleeper by Edgar Allan Poe

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The Sleeper

by Edgar Allan Poe

At midnight, in the month of June,
I stand beneath the mystic moon.
An opiate vapor, dewy, dim,
Exhales from out her golden rim,
And softly dripping, drop by drop,
Upon the quiet mountain top,
Steals drowsily and musically
Into the universal valley.
The rosemary nods upon the grave;
The lily lolls upon the wave;
Wrapping the fog about its breast,
The ruin moulders into rest;
Looking like Lethe, see! the lake
A conscious slumber seems to take,
And would not, for the world, awake.
All Beauty sleeps!—and lo! where lies
Irene, with her Destinies!

Oh, lady bright! can it be right—
This window open to the night?
The wanton airs, from the tree-top,
Laughingly through the lattice drop—
The bodiless airs, a wizard rout,
Flit through thy chamber in and out,
And wave the curtain canopy
So fitfully—so fearfully—
Above the closed and fringéd lid
’Neath which thy slumb’ring soul lies hid,
That, o’er the floor and down the wall,
Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall!
Oh, lady dear, hast thou no fear?
Why and what art thou dreaming here?
Sure thou art come o’er far-off seas,
A wonder to these garden trees!
Strange is thy pallor! strange thy dress!
Strange, above all, thy length of tress,
And this all solemn silentness!

The lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,
Which is enduring, so be deep!
Heaven have her in its sacred keep!
This chamber changed for one more holy,
This bed for one more melancholy,
I pray to God that she may lie
Forever with unopened eye,
While the pale sheeted ghosts go by!

My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,
As it is lasting, so be deep!
Soft may the worms about her creep!
Far in the forest, dim and old,
For her may some tall vault unfold—
Some vault that oft hath flung its black
And wingéd pannels fluttering back,
Triumphant, o’er the crested palls
Of her grand family funerals—

Some sepulchre, remote, alone,
Against whose portals she hath thrown,
In childhood, many an idle stone—
Some tomb from out whose sounding door
She ne’er shall force an echo more,
Thrilling to think, poor child of sin!
It was the dead who groaned within.

The Letter by Amy Lowell

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The Letter

by Amy Lowell

Little cramped words scrawling all over the paper
Like draggled fly’s legs,
What can you tell of the flaring moon
Through the oak leaves?
Or of my uncurtained window and the bare floor
Spattered with moonlight?
Your silly quirks and twists have nothing in them
Of blossoming hawthorns,
And this paper is dull, crisp, smooth, virgin of loveliness
Beneath my hand.

I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart against
The want of you;
Of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.
And I scald alone, here, under the fire
Of the great moon.

Conversation Galante by T. S. Eliot

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Conversation Galante

by T. S. Eliot

I observe: “Our sentimental friend the moon!
Or possibly (fantastic, I confess)
It may be Prester John’s balloon
Or an old battered lantern hung aloft
To light poor travellers to their distress.”
She then: “How you digress!”

And I then: “Some one frames upon the keys
That exquisite nocturne, with which we explain
The night and moonshine; music which we seize
To body forth our own vacuity.”
She then: “Does this refer to me?”
“Oh no, it is I who am inane.”

“You, madam, are the eternal humorist,
The eternal enemy of the absolute,
Giving our vagrant moods the slightest twist!
With your aid indifferent and imperious
At a stroke our mad poetics to confute—”
And—“Are we then so serious?”

Drinking Alone in the Moonlight by Li Po

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Drinking Alone in the Moonlight

by Li Po (or Li Bai)

Under the flowering trees, with a bottle of wine,
I drink alone, for no friend is near.
Raising my cup I call the bright moon,
For he, with my shadow, make us three.
The moon is no drinker of wine;
Listless, my shadow only follows me.
With the moon and shadow as friends
We are joyful in the late Spring night.
I sing my songs to the moon and she dances in beams;
In the dance I weave my shadow tangles and breaks.
While we were sober, three shared the fun;
Now we are drunk, each goes his way.
May we long share our odd, inanimate feast,
And meet again at last on in the Milky Way.

THE MOON by William H. Davies

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William H. Davies (1871-1940)

THE MOON by William H. Davies

Thy beauty haunts me heart and soul,
Oh, thou fair Moon, so close and bright;
Thy beauty makes me like the child
That cries aloud to own thy light:
The little child that lifts each arm
To press thee to her bosom warm.
Though there are birds that sing this night
With thy white beams across their throats,
Let my deep silence speak for me
More than for them their sweetest notes:
Who worships thee till music fails,
Is greater than thy nightingales.