Tuesday, April 9, 2013

once in moonlight


[Once in moonlight . . .]


Once in moonlight when I had not slept for three nights,
when there was no food and a long rain had stopped,
and some had slept outside in the rain you could see
the streaks it had left on their skin,
once in the eighth week of my captivity,
alone in the moonlight outside on the ledge,
I looked up and felt the stars move
strangely back and forth, a slow rocking,
as though the Lord were rocking us somehow back and forth,
and I was not afraid but tears came anyway
as I remembered my children so far away,
the way children can call you back
in through your thoughts and keep you awake
like hearing the stars ring all night long.
And when you watch animals die,
when deer die you notice it,
how they don’t cry out—
I could see it in my mind’s eye—
they don’t cry out but lie there, eyes open,
and then they are dead outside of themselves
they are dead but inside themselves
they have joined the earth where they have always been
rocking and rocking.—And so
I was able to sleep a few hours before our next remove,
miles and miles beyond the Great River,
though I had lost track of our place in the world.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great blog! And thanks for posting my poem!--John Spaulding

Liane said...

john, oh, thank you for visiting! i hope you don't mind that i posted the poem...i do like it very much. i should have posted a link to you elsewhere on the web...i found your wikipedia entry and will link to there. if you have another site you'd rather me link to, let me know.
-liane

Anonymous said...

Liane---Thanks again!
I have some poems and an interview as well as an essay on my work in LA college's online WEST magazine, if you are interested....And my website is www.jspaulding.com
Best wishes, John