Syzygy
—with Joyce Ellen Davis

Last night's blood moon came, then went,
leaving us like a bunch of jilted brides
stranded at the altar. It was red, and also rusty
with the high tide, like a dream in oxidation,
the standard link of bodies on a rhapsody.
Death that the early scientist meant with words
a committee archived inside the belly of Rome.
But there we were, ready for rapture to a rented room
in a Motel 6, willing, like Isaac, like a thousand
immaculate virgins whose lamps have gone out.
I thought of Einstein, of Kepler and of all masters
whose world bends and falls. I thought of me
upon a lost, irritable earth. It was just a moon,
but no thought stayed from it, not one mantra
nor the preaching of men to hold it down,
or make it stop. In the minutes that shadowed us
as it floated across, the caveman resuscitated,
circling a fire and singing, like only he could,
about how last night's blood moon came and went;
till all was nearly deathly, then ashen, till it turned
the corner of day to update us on how we will be
in the time behind all absence from our world.
October 2015


—Rethabile Masilo
https://cutt.ly/9TRsygX