Biscuit Moon

(a poem from nothing)

I was loitering through my colleague’s art class last week when a couple of students, having delighted in a classmate’s description of the moon as a “sky cookie,” suggested I convert the idea into a poem. My friend the art teacher had told them, I guess, that I sometimes write nonsense verses like this one. So with a little free time over the Thanksgiving break, I gave it a shot. It was supposed to be a children’s poem of sorts, but it went in a very different direction. “Cookie” being a relatively narrow Americanism, I went with a term of broader meaning and usage, and that minor change, no doubt, is responsible for the whole shift in purport. Special thanks to Anna Vander Wall for helping me smooth out some of the wrinkles. If you, dear reader, find your own wrinkles, feel free to make suggestions—no poem ever feels complete.

The moon is just a biscuit
baked of light and gently fed
to the slow-devouring darkness
spreading nightly overhead.

Its crumbs lie all about it
lest the darkness, never full,
find its ration unreplenished
and have nothing to annul.

Thus remnants form the figures,
constellations now divine:
starry specks amidst the waters
still resisting to be wine. 

But light is always gracious
and returns to yield its good
to that oven, dead and empty,
which by eating makes it food

like the moon—just a biscuit
ever leavening the dead
till diffused throughout the heavens
it devours night instead.  

Nocturne, by Odilon Redon