A woman in the moon watched the girl a-meandering, watch’d in all pleasure of the company and as if at the cinema, a girl steppen precisely – plung’d amuck in instant dark, and imprecisely about the Summer, 2012. Watch’d where her footsteps fell’d and her heart was blown topsy atumble this way and that.
Ten years ago the moonwoman watched the girl stand at the silken mouth of a waterfall and wed a man; a decade and one million salt tears ago and ’til his own passing, where afunereal she felt her back bend, holding his sons in her wounded arms – these hearts he’d given ‘afore his own heart had burst –
(‘afore her own heart ruptured too at the pain, meted and received).
Her fist clenched at all the terrors in plain sight and those that stay’d leashed behind blind turns so that for sixty-three days her hands have formed these useless clubs and nothing has got made. But her feet had not afroze upon the path and sixty-three steps have delivered her under the moon’s sorrowful face –
(time will obey no one, not even the “grieving process,” not human trouble, not meted nor received).
Everyone gets one call, at least one, and everyone will know that all wounds begin to self-stitch in the days and hours and minutes after that call that seems to rip the world asunder. The girl tumbled into the caverns, ripped away from the ground and it was a good while to climb back up to the floorbed of the earth. The moonlady will tell you: many minutes passed and the girl stole a look up and gazed into the white orb’s great face for a long while, a-peering, reading the heart of the moon. In time, the girl moved away and her small footsteps were tread’d in liberty under the earthlamp.
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mary june brown 