The Solstice Moon
I wrote the first poem two years ago when the full moon landed in the portal of the winter solstice.
I woke in the thin hours of the night, sure that someone had called my name. This wasn’t entirely new, as I was up most nights at that hour cooling my burning skin, and breathing into a quieter mind that was raging in confusion and desire for an awakened life.
It could all be blamed on the liminal changes of midlife, but it could also be blamed on the very recent resignation from my career. Arguably, one begot the other, and I was squarely undergoing the painful and necessary process of extracting myself from anything that no longer felt like a fit in my life.
This time, there was no smokescreen of victimhood. I was doing so under my own free will. Terrified, willing, emboldened by the idea that this life could be a happy one, no holds barred. I didn’t know what was next, so I just started walking, one small step in front of the other, hoping each night that I didn’t find a cliff before daybreak.
The confluence of a full moon on the winter solstice had escaped my attention in the waking hours, but there in the dark, the massive beam of light streaming through the bedroom window called me to the foot of the bed where I perched on hands and knees searching for the source.
I found it in a shock of light, blinding and beautiful. Luminous and loud. It dominated the night sky and called me forward from my sleep to ask if I wanted to start a bigger conversation. Not the kind I had been accustomed to - full of drama and deflection - but the kind I had been craving for too many years, and never felt I deserved to have.
And I said yes, like a bride on her wedding night. Take me, I said, and that is when the conversation began. With myself. With the moon. With a future, I dared to envision that was full of freedom and written words and aligned purpose.
Did I deserve this future? I didn’t know. But I was determined to find out what it took to become someone who did. So, I began allowing these poems to come forth in the precious hours of the night, starting with this one.
A love letter to the moon.
A love letter to myself.
A bid for new beginnings on the longest night of the year.
SOLSTICE MOON
I sit in the white-hot beam of the full solstice moon, hanging heavy in the black sky. Just before dawn, when the night is sweetest and the dreaming heads see their biggest visions for what is possible.
At the foot of my bed. At the feet of my sleeping loves, its great, blazing eye sets me alight.
In its beam, I am a coiled seed in the forest lome, under the soft and damp soil. My shell brown and dead but inside an unfurling green shoot, ripe and ready.
Oh sweet solstice moon, burn, burn in the night sky. Burn away this chaff, this dead and old life that I heave around like a holy cross.
Fill this longing heart with promise for the new day, a lighter load, a cleansing rain, the spring sun.
Let us together rewrite the imprint on my cells. Burn away what was given but no longer serves.
Give me the plume and a full well of ink to write this life anew.
