Moonlight

Long ago, in the days of fire, when the Earth cried out

as it threw its fluid blocks through the white sky,

slowly swelling her original curves

and, in a great effort, split her fiery flanks

and hurled, toward the flux of worlds already born,

the Moon that grew within her.

Then in the splendor of brilliant centuries,

tirelessly, endlessly, eternally,

the mother, drunk with love, contemplated in her strength

the heavenly infant who ran like a young sun.

She burned! Cold made her sleepy

and petrified her skin.

Then came the blonde age of soft temperatures and winds.

The Moon was inhabited with living murmurs.

She had bottomless oceans and numberless rivers;

flocks, cities, tears, cries of joy;

she knew love, the arts, laws, her gods,

and slowly she slipped back into the shadows.

There has been nothing since the like of her young, hot kiss.

The Earth grows old, and still searches the heavens for her.

All is bare... but at night, a ghostly sphere passes

and you might say, seeing her form wander noiselessly,

that she was the soul of a dead child returning at night

to watch her mother sleep.