Sunday 21 November 2010

NOVEMBER - Freezing Moon

Well, we’re nearing the end of this year of lunar-dictated poem-blogs (or should that be, moon-plogs?)  And as the evenings continue drawing in, and the streets are paved with grit, this certainly is the month of a freezing moon – in Scotland’s Central Belt if not the Native Lands of the North American Tribes.  November is also the month of the dead, when people remember saints and souls, certain martyrs and those who died while killing others or defending an allegiance.

If only we could defend the lives of threatened species as well as we defend a flag. Whether these beasts are mythical or really existed is neither here nor there: the loss of any animal, plant, or human life is a tragedy of epic proportion.  God forbid we should lose the gift of empathy that stems from our utmost unique faculty, the Imagination.  But then, it is this loss (or suspension, or suppression) that enables people to fight wars for what they think is right.

Rights are neither here nor there. Death is final, whosever side you’re on.


Moon Phases, November 2010
New Moon – November 6, 04:52
First Quarter – November 13, 16:39
Full Moon – November 21, 17:27
Last Quarter – November 28, 20:36


The Unicorn


A few hundred million years since the dinosaur
was duped by catastrophism, erased by uniformitarianism,
or when the sun's own sister showed her dark side,
and sent cataclysmic hell-showers upon our frozen earth,
a smarter race appeared to test supremacy,
and assist the mutually assured destruction of nature's gentle tide.
And yet the dinosaur is only marginally older than the
contents of the ark: it stands for simply that, an age gone by.

The Dodo has a more difficult time, immortalised
not by its quirky life or shape, but symbolising
in figure of speech the bleak reality of its demise.
Similarly the fate of the tiger, the tusks of the elephant,
and horn of the great white rhino fall prey to lies
which pamper to fallacy, greed, and pallid vanity:
to be hounded out of existence by spurious design.

Perhaps the phallic unicorn evolved
from what was first deemed good:
its epic strength and tender beauty held androgyny
in balance with grace like a mythical god.

But when this horned equestrian
- one of nature's true vegetarians -
gently nudged the fruit with his miracle tool
(which once had the power to quell raging waters -
A wasted potential) he inadvertently speared it.

A kindly, nubile and nymphomaniacal creature
took both the seed and protuberant weapon,
ate the fruit, then purporting it's aphrodisiacal nature,
ground the horn into a paste, inflating the alleged
membership of her race, whereupon

the Unicorn, demoted from ecclesiastical equus
to Grecian bucolis, as punishment for its innocence,
was denied a place on one man's microcosmic paradise.
Denuded and disempowered of its former potency
it perished the ultimate sentence in the deluvian purge.

Had the moon been full when the rain fell,
and had the floods that lifted that floating zoo
been petrified by the freezing moon of the Lakota Sioux,
it might not have preserved the frozen myth,
or the memory of an imaginary menagerie,

but as blocks of ice from God's deep freeze thawed
six hundred million years later, four thousand winters,
or a drop-in-the-ocean millennia or two,
the global warmth might have revealed the truth.

This story is thus;
the punishment of death for good,
whether innocent, naïve, or just plain thick -
it matters as little to us.
Like death, extinct is for ever.
- As the dodo, an irreversible trick.