Lessons of the Morning Moon

Walk past houses, many of them homes;
Walk down a path that serves many as a road;
Pass the mouth of a sacerdotal cave where liturgies are mumbled in the time-worn manner to spirits long gone to dust;
Move through the clouding incense of modest sacrifice and the savoury mist of morning meals – leave behind the faces and places of the homely world and seek the moon lingering on the fringe of a brightening dawn.

Beneath lies a city, but the lesson isn’t there – it lies by the river;
No, the lesson is the river, which flows even frozen and unlit.
That simple insistence defies the length of eternity and the breadth of an instant to encompass it - a failure that makes futile our illusions of ourselves as faces with places, things with things, tethered demons, lost angels, or bags of wind to be contemplated rushing in and out.

What moon and river offer is the opportunity to witness;
To witness a story that fails with the first forgotten word,
And runs hopelessly awry whenever ignorant voices try to sieze it.
Yet no matter what cacophonies obscure it, and no matter how hard we try to forget it as we seek to rewrite our world, the story the of the morning moon and river waits to be taken up.
It begins at the shore like this: it is the nature of sand to slip through fingers, and the nature of fingers to slip through sand.

Copyright © 2006 F.G. Pluthero