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Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem.-Edgar Allan Poe

Poetry is when emotion has found its thought and thought has found words--Robert Frost

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance--Carl Sandburg

I have nothing to say, I am saying it, and that is poetry--John Cage

You will find poetry nowhere unless you bring some of it with you--Joseph Joubert

Poetry is what in a poem makes you laugh, cry, prickle, be silent, makes your toe nails twinkle, makes you want to do this or that or nothing, makes you know that you are alone in the unknown world, that your bliss and suffering is forever shared and forever all your own. ~Dylan Thomas

joybragi84

Moon Diver: Slight Return (a lyric poem) And the Answer to a Reader's Question in Picture


Comments after poem! Enjoy!


The Moon Diver

(Slight Return)


Beware the doldrums of July,

When whippoorwill and firefly

May make you feel secure at night

With soothing song and glowing light.


In dawns that steam and dusks that sweat,

Moon Diver, he is out there yet,

Polluting dreams with carnal heat,

Convincing wives their husbands cheat


And hissing into jealous ears

The gist of every spouses’ fears

That any wife alone in bed

Would have horns on her husband’s head.


And in the forests through the trees,

His wicked words twist in the breeze,

Telling the mouse that Owl is dead

While Owl’s wide eyes watch overhead.


He coaxes mother bird to sleep

Then makes her fledglings thrash and peep

Which rouses Snake from lidless rest.

He even helps it find the nest.


Moon Diver does all in his power

To waste the bloom on every flower,

To lure the worm to every root,

To blight the seed in every fruit,


To yank the tail of any cat,

No matter what or where it’s at,

So when the dogs set in to howl

Know that Moon Diver’s on the prowl.


Moon Diver never blinks an eye

But watches from a star-filled sky

Until some dreamer, unaware,

Invites him into his nightmare.


Anybody who knows me well at all knew that I would be returning to the myth of the Moon Diver. It is one that I invented, but I like it--the myth and the idea. There is no particular reason why I returned to Moon Diver at this point. I simply had the first few verses twirling in my head, and when I jotted them down, a few more felt like they needed to be added.

By the way, I have decided that the creature of the myth will simply be Moon Diver, not "The Moon Diver." I will not, however, be going back and changing the original poem.

Speaking of the original poem, for those of you who missed it back in the winter, I will repost it after I answer a question that I was asked by a reader via email.

A faithful blog reader asked, "Which weed are you talking about when you say "bitterweed?" There are lots of different bitterweeds."

Yes, there are various plants called bitterweed, and my dad called basically any weed with a yellow flower bitterweed. I am referring to the one pictured below, which is also called sneezeweed, yellow dick, bitter sneezeweed, and fiveleaf sneezeweed. I have only ever heard it called bitterweed. Here is a picture that I took this morning. The weed has practically taken over one bank at the fairgrounds next to the road where Kellie and I walk every morning.


Finally, here is the original, but heavily revised, version of Moon Diver, then known as The Moon Diver. Enjoy!


The Moon Diver


Have you heard of the Moon Diver,

A foul mischievous imp,

Who puts lines on ladies’ faces

And gives healthy fellows a limp?


He alters us while we’re sleeping

Or in a restless swoon

By diving straight into our dreams

From his perch on the swaying moon.


So, when the lamp glows overhead

Fasten the windows tight

And watch the sky with wary eye

For this naughty fairy in flight.


Don’t look for him too near the orb,

You cannot see him there,

For his skin is polished onyx,

And dragonfly wings form his hair.


No, it’s best to find him slinking

From the censuring sun

When it imbues the world with light

And nightmarish visions are done.


He spends his days in ponds and streams,

Inky watery nooks,

Performing nasty turtle tricks,

Tangling lines and straightening hooks,


Or sliding through unkempt gardens

Causing dried leaves to shake

And hiss as if they’re being stirred

By scales of a venomous snake.


When his tomfoolery is done,

He slithers out of sight

And schemes all day to act his worst

Under cover of looming night.

At dusk, he slinks up ivied trees,

As fledglings flee their nest.

He sits among the topmost limbs

And eagerly watches the west.


When no small sliver of the sun

Splinters the western skies,

He leaps up past the canine star,

Pulls its ears and punches its eyes.


He twists the ring in the bull’s nose,

Blaming poor Orion,

And plucks the hairs of both the bears,

Riding the back of the lion.


He hides behind the astral sphere,

Trailing it through the stars,

Stealing the seed god’s seven rings

And plucking the cherry of Mars.


Then, he squats with trembling haunches

On a pale lunar beam

Like an incubus sits on its victim

Waiting for a crippling dream.


When he hears unsettled moaning,

Moon Diver stands to leap

And falls dart-like through the black night

Into your delusional sleep.

Kommentare


I find that I cannot exist without Poetry--without eternal poetry--half the day will not do--the whole of it--I began with a little, but habit has made me a Leviathan.-John Keats

We do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value.-T. S. Eliot

A man may praise and praise, but no one recollects but that which pleases.-George Gordon, Lord Byron

The great beauty of poetry is that it makes everything in every place interesting.-John Keats

Our faulty elder poets sacrificed the passion and passionate flow of poetry to the subtleties of intellect and to the stars of wit; the moderns to the glare and glitter of a perpetual, yet broken and heterogeneous imagery, or rather to an amphibious something, made up, half of image, and half of abstract meaning. The one sacrificed the heart to the head; the other both heart and head to point and drapery.-S. T. Coleridge

The purpose of rhythm, it has always seemed to me, is to prolong the moment of contemplation, the moment when we are both asleep and awake, which is the one moment of creation.-W. B. Yeats

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