Between the Moon & Me

Sometimes the hour of sadness

Hovers like a cloud 

So fragile and so tender 

Too real to talk about

A finger to my lips

A silent reverie

Just between the moon and me

O how the words unspoken 

Linger on my tongue

Trying to convince me

That what is done is done

But I know what I wish for 

When I’m counting sheep

Just between the moon and me

It’s a minor bird

In a minor tree

The song I know by heart

The key of you and me

And now the past plays tricks

On my memory

Tries to make sense

Out of what will never be

But I am just the prose

She’s the poetry

That’s why she will always be

Just between the moon and me

—Tom Prasada-Rao

[Lyrics written by a talented high school friend].

Time

Time is a relentless river. It rages on, a respecter of no one. And this, this is the only way to slow time: 

When I fully enter time's swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, 

I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here. 

I can slow the torrent by being all here.

—Ann Voskamp (One Thousand Gifts)

[Baasch Family, E. Wallingford, VT, 1995] 

The Stillness of the World Before Bach

 

There must have been a world before
the Trio Sonata in D, a world before the A minor Partita,
but what kind of a world?
A Europe of vast empty spaces, unresounding,
everywhere unawakened instruments
where the Musical Offering, the Well-Tempered Clavier
never passed across the keys.
Isolated churches
where the soprano line of the Passion
never in helpless love twined round
the gentler movements of the flute,
broad soft landscapes
where nothing breaks the stillness
but old woodcutters' axes,
the healthy barking of strong dogs in winter
and, like a bell, skates biting into fresh ice;
the swallows whirring through summer air,
the shell resounding at the child's ear
and nowhere Bach nowhere Bach
the world in a skater's stillness before Bach.

--Lars Gustafsson
translated by Philip Martin

[Douglas performing Bach's Suite VI in D Major for Unaccompanied Cello]

Moon and Water

 

I wake and spend
the last hours
of darkness
with no one but the moon.
She listens
to my complaints

like the good

companion she is
and comforts me surely
with her light.
But she, like everyone,

has her own life.
So finally I understand
that she has turned away,
is no longer listening.

She wants me
to refold myself
into my own life.
And, bending close,

as we all dream of doing,
she rows with her white arms
through the dark water
which she adores.

    --Mary Oliver

[Lunar eclipse 11-8-22]