Dark With Supermoon

What does a writer do when they are not writing? I go through phases where poetry is flowing, and phases where it is stopped. I’m a hospice nurse, so when I’m not writing I can always accept more patients and work myself ragged to distract myself from the fact that I am not doing my art. So there’s that.

As a writer, you have to accept the barren/fallow times as a necessary part of the ebb and flow of the writing process. It’s important to focus on the fallow, not on the barren. Sometimes I am writing, and it’s amazing, and I feel alive and vibrant. Sometimes I am not writing, and I feel dormant. But as much as I accept this and understand it, I do not like it, any more than as a sun worshipper and lover of lush vegetation I like the dormancy of Winter. When I am not writing, I feel that an important part of me is dead.

And then one day, I’m journaling and I write a few sentences that I suddenly realize are not prose. They spark up. Something lights inside me. I transcribe them into my sad, neglected poetry notebook and they flame up there, I write more and the flames catch and there’s a vivid sense of burning, good heat. When it dies down, the embers stay lit so next day when I go back to it I only have to blow for the poem to relight. More light, and more. Sometimes a whole verse in one go. Sometimes just a line or two. And it’s capricious. I’ve had poems die as I wrote them, just go stale and fail to catch and sputter out.

Just before this New Year, I was writing in my diary about the year being almost over. Almost there, I wrote, almost at the bottom of the year. Then the year flips over and we are at the top. These were the lines that sparked something, and I transcribed them and started working them up. I thought for a while about whether December was the bottom of the year or the top of it. Shouldn’t we climb up the year, starting from the bottom? But in the end I liked better the idea that we start January with a full year and it runs down, like an egg timer. So New Year’s Eve is a zenith, and New Year’s Day a summit of sorts.

The first verse of the poem was all about how New Year feels like a reset. Everything starts again, hopeful, full of promise and potential, a blank canvas, numbers reset to zero. Then towards the end of the second verse, the poem took a darker turn. No, really? My poetry? I was being influenced by a funeral I had been to with my teen daughter of her friend who took his own life just before Christmas. I started thinking about climate change, the cataclysmic weather events happening around the globe, how they sometimes feel like the dying throes of a planet fighting for its life, and losing. The third verse became about the imagined funeral of our planet.

Since New Year’s Day saw a supermoon this year, I had been writing in my diary about what a dark time it had been, the last few weeks of the year, and yet the supermoon felt like a metaphor for the optimism and hope I always feel around the new year. Dark with supermoon, I’d written. Because I always like to try and abrogate the darkness in my work, to bring it round at the last to something infused with hope, that seemed like a fitting title for the poem.

I worked on it a few days into the year but found myself constrained by the form I had tied myself to (why?!) of 13-line stanzas. The poem wanted to break free, reflect a little more the chaos of our world and future. So it finished with four stanzas of different lengths. Dark, change, chaos, and hope. And the greatest of these is hope.

Dark With Supermoon

Almost there,

Almost at the bottom of the year,

Then the year flips giddily over

And we are at the top;

The summit is blindingly bright

And the air thin, with the supermoon

Spitting stars into the night,

Supermoon spinning in the galaxy’s arms

And our planet wearing its crown of thorns;

All the numbers zero out

And the dreams kick into high gear

And the hopes are all reset

With the first ragged breath of the year.

Then we’re back to ordinary time

The year a little broken in, a little tamed,

No longer new, the winds change

The way they’re meant to change

And the sands shifting beneath my feet

Are unpredictable as I expect;

The tides ebb and flow

The way the shoreline birds expect them to,

The candles gutter and burn low

And we’ll be sleeping as we’re meant to be

When the waters climb out of the sea.

The planet’s funeral 

Will be unholy, awful; I will stand alone

Outside the church in the mourners’ stream

Searching for friends so I can grieve with them

All warmth will be gone, the sandstorms

Will have scoured the deserts raw,

The rage will come in waves

But eventually leave, and the fires

Will have satisfied their greed,

They will have eaten all they see.

When the air is minus seventeen degrees

And light is reflected through

The particles of ice, the sun builds

A sun-pillar in the singular dawn.

I don’t know why it took so long

For me to learn: you have to break fear open

Over and over, rise up

And carry yourself across the water

To the others waiting on the shore.

A hawk balances delicately on the wind’s edge

And the year’s heart is beating strongly now

As it trains its one yellow eye

With fierce intensity

On the dark.