Hail, bright crescent: earth sleeps inside white shell,
while diamond shingles both river and lake,
although hammerbeaks of woodpeckers tell
how insects and sees must begin to wake.
Snowmelt in rivulets churns slush to mud,
freezes at nightfall, as pure potential.
Red robin sings from the black birch’s bud;
ice-locked pond yearns to become torrential,
when cracks carry rainfall and heat to heart.
Warm days brightly sparkle, cold nights twinkle;
wrens build nests more engineering than art.
Snow sharply defines land’s every wrinkle,
yet sunset through branches begins to blur,
as beech births brachets, and elms start to spur.
This is four or five days late; my apologies for the delay. I was out walking yesterday evening, and the moon kind of surprised me for the first time in a while. I knew, intellectually, that moondark was last Friday/Saturday, but I hadn’t expected the moon to be quite so large, quite so quick. After two and a half years of writing these sonnets, it was nice to be surprised by the moon again. She sneaks up on you, and changes the way you look at the world, every time.
