Once in a Blue Moon

Tonight is the night before Halloween, the night before the Hunter's Blue Moon. Tonight Mars is the gem sitting above the moon, the wet moon, the ice moon, the moon that will bring us beauty and, perhaps, grace in this year of ugliness and worry. I'm posting this old poem of mine, because today has felt like a day to tussle with sadness and worry.

Am I blue                   

    “Ain't these tears in my eyes tellin' you?”~~Harry Akst & Grant Clarke

Blue is absent from the throat of night
saddened by the dirge the owl sings
as she sits a solitary beacon in the oak.
 
Here she lulls Blue to sleep at dusk
allows her tongue to draw Blue
into a chamber of darkness.
 
The moon rushes in, grapples light
into shadow, horns color away.
Carried in the wind Coyote’s solo voice
 
soothes Blue; she rests at the edge
the pond, beds down with muskrat
as frogs begin their hymns and usher
 
in sleep. Sleep finds the sieves of logic,
allows Blue to rumble around on
the flipside of sorrow. Dreams burst into
 
song whenever sadness is encountered,
breathes life into suicidal thoughts,

clears sky of cloud and storm
 
the three-hour worry of the child
not home. Here lovers never split,
having never met, wars are never begun
 
and, so, none need an end. And in the most
fantastic part of dream, where loneliness
learns of alone, Blue knows she is dreaming.
 
In the deepest part of the dark she feels exhaustion
seeping along her spine. She longs to stay asleep
and in this fog, but knows, oh she knows,
Grief has already been born.