Prompt poem (three)

(The prompt for this one: Remember your voice.)

Here in space,
nobody can hear you do much of anything.

Scream, certainly --
which is what you do the first few days.
Or weep, or moan, or curse your fate,
ringing the full changes on profanity
in several half-remembered languages.

Finally, you get used to the quiet.
You start hearing the subtle difference
between the radiant hush of the stars
and the muteness of your drifting body.

At last you find peace. Or perhaps
a simple acquiescence.
You stopped screaming long ago.

You turn like the moon,
facing sun, then shadow,
then sun again.

Your gloved fingers eclipse the Earth,
silhouetted on vacant blue.

You close your eyes and drift through silence.

Here in space, nobody can hear you pray.

Prompt poem too

(Another prompt from Facebook: "Wishing for night")


It will come at last:
this sweet cessation, this tiny, vagrant death,
this rambling through dim fields of dream.

It will come again.
And end far, far too soon
when light puddles the horizon:

this daily burning, this uncouth clarity,
this louche, foul revenant we fled in sleep:
the soul's eclipse, our fragile benediction.

Prompt poem

(For a friend's poetry prompt Facebook page. The prompt: "The moon slips its mooring and drifts away.")


The moon has fallen into the pond behind the garden.
I row out to where it bobs,
Luminous, tangled in lilies, soiled with duckweed.

It's too big to fit in my boat --
An awkward shape, and much too heavy,
And the boat in any case too leaky. And so

I leave it there, another lost regret,
Like last winter's fallen stars,
Left melting through the snow.