The moon is a ghost, a god.
She is a white rabbit of silver
Eyes and whiskers.
He is an ancient demon, a teething child.
There is a person in the moon
And they’re crying crater tears.

To climb to the moon you must build
A ladder of night-bleached bones.
To launch yourself into lunar orbit
You need only jump off the tallest cliff
And the moon will catch you in its net.
Shooting weapons at the moon in drunken revelry
Is how the terrain is formed, the Sea
Of Tranquility littered with shrapnel,
The dark side, an arrow graveyard.
If you swim in the ocean under argent light
The moon’s elves will carry you
Skyward in a sterling palanquin.

Only few are privy to the truth.
How one Day before the World
Had finished building itself from Nothing,
I found in the river made of my torrential grief
A stone that only Days ago had weighed down
The pockets of my lover’s dress; a stone
Now infused with her last breath of bubbles.
You see, her dainty, deity’s constitution
Had been unable to bear the inexorable deluge
Of Creation she and I started from our union,
Choosing to give up her mortal body instead.

I took the stone and rubbed it smooth and round
Between my fingers, then dug my nails in,
My teeth, clumsy scrivener
Inscribing my billowy agony.
I looked up with broken teeth and fractured
Fingernails, and I was in the sky, celestial body
Floating instead of falling, my touch of light
Enfolding the whole infant World,
My lover and I taking turns
Holding and polishing our silver, scarred stone
To a luminary sheen.

© Avra Margariti