Majesty
Majesty by Beth Moon
Your hull muscles its way into
the forest, the 1% of you that’s still alive.
Your eyes are not empty. A squirrel
pops his head out, he’s your pupil.
I’m your pupil. By your vigor, how you’ve
welcomed the sun, a history of seasons
in your skin. Your great gape offers shelter
to wrens, bats, children’s offerings—such
resonance in your hollow, orisons and sighs.
Your mouth sweetly mossy with songs;
your limbs full of dare and possibility
and your hair, OMG, your hair!
Owl face opens,
its voice a slow trawl
through foggy inlets,
slivers of ice memory,
snow hair’s ancient beauty new
each season of melt,
moon braille carved
on nights of wind howl,
by pelting rain and the fingers
of God; snow hair
les cheveux de la niege, new
each throng of sedge warblers,
when bees let honey
ooze a sweet-mask
down the trunk –
fluent in languages
of soil and time,
shrinks, stretches, swells,
weathers the languid
carousel of stars,
el cabello de la nieve, new
each ancient spring.
Time
makes
us more
than we
can imagine.
Does not
diminish
the inward
flame, but
makes majesty
of gnarled and
knotted skin.
Take this tree
simmering
in sunlight,
a brutal silver
the vaulting
leaves above.
An oblong gap
in the trunk
large enough
for a slender
woman to sit
No wind to
forgive time
bustling by.
A broken
branch shagged
with autumn
in the green
fuzz below.
Words
fell away
long
ago.
What was
worth
saving
now lost
in a prayer
of rain.
A desert moth floats unharmed among yucca
most spiked of lilies. How intimate is
this shaggy forest with survival; for instance,
Joshua stores water in his trunk. And on occasion
his bristly arms offer bulky cream blooms
soft scent of smoke. Here, the yucca-moth busy
with pollen, lays her own eggs. Too many?
the Joshua can abort ovaries. And imagine—
his prayer reaches to clouds heaped in dense blue.
Come dusk, the bright billows darken, drop
rain through the spun out distance between us,
plant and human.