Moon to Moon Nights
This poem tied for first place in the 2021 Clinton F. Larson Poetry Contest, sponsored by BYU Studies.
like time-lapse film, signify now a moment, now a lifetime. A bonedrift of stone shapes pale and rise like years along garden’s edge. . . .
What erasures there are in memory remain a presence— like every pasture since that first childhood bringing in of the cows. A remnant fear of drought surfaces again,
decades after turns for irrigation on your father’s farm, changing canvas dams in the shallow ditches, twice before bed, again before dawn—that early acquaintance with twilights, the lit variegations of water moving in the dark.
Now the voices of children—your own— ribbon the sheer deep of sky no bears out tonight what time is it Moon? And their children answer, present tense, your own voice fading with stars in this moonrise light.
Like the river and all rivers you have ever known—undercurrents pulling out of sight— night breezes tune in and out with peripherals of sound, their patterns fractal, ongoing, and still unsayable.
This poem tied for first place in the 2021 Clinton F. Larson Poetry Contest, sponsored by BYU Studies.