For a Waning Moon
For a Waning Moon
Sean Beckett
I’m worried about the moon.
She looks thinner by the day.
I don’t know how to talk to her
about this. Dwindled and thinned to
the fringe of a finger-nail
held to the candle.
Is she pale for weariness?
For illness? Lack of food?
I have not earned the place
to speak. But she rises so weak
tonight. Slim & luminous as if
there is nothing inside her but
light. Her nylon nightdress
shroud-like. She used to have a face
like the clock in the hall. Used to
glow big like a backlit snow globe.
Now she burns like a wick.
A rounded fragment of ice
no longer filled.
All denigrate her character.
Don’t tell me the moon is shining, they say.
They’d rather look at broken glass.
Call her annihilating because she will not last?
They say she is bald and wild, that she drags the sea after… like a dark crime—
accuse her of having the dispassionateness of a disembodied soul.
An arrant thief? Her pale fire she snatches from the sun?
She is no thief.
She gives herself
night by night.
Sloughing illumination
on each branch and leaf
and pavement scratch, flakes of
light breaking off her skin in scraps.
Shedding glow. Giving as if
she weren’t dying. Volunteering her soul
as if that
could save her.
No one seems to care.
No moon-talk at all now.
Have they forgotten her?
No one else notices that she
appears, unasked,
during the day. She must
barely sleep. A pockmarked
cheek pressed against the clouds.
Did she doubt? Is that why she’ll go out?
No one could unlock her. No one would rescue her.
She is barely edge now.
A glimmer of phosphorescent fever.
Splintered ghost, outline, sharp edge, gesture.
As someone said—
This is not the moon.
This is a finger.
A finger pointing
to a hole
the size of the sky.
Italicized lines from Hopkins, Shelley, Stevenson, Chekhov, Plath, Conrad, Shakespeare, Sandburg, Blake, and Murakami.
Sean Beckett
Poet
Sean graduated with an MFA in poetry from Boston University and is now studying theology at Regent College in Vancouver.
Photography by Benjamin Voros