Gray

[rejectomorph]

The gossamer clouds which drifted all night shot with stars have vanished as a gray morning nears. A chill fog, thin at the ground but growing dense above has wreathed the forest, making the distant ridges vague. Despite the wintry scent it has brought, the morning birds chirp, loud and persistent. I remember how clearly the crescent moon shone last evening. Now there seems not even to be a sky, but only this vaporous roof that threatens to devour the treetops. Surpassingly strange.

Moon

by Derek Walcott


Resisting poetry I am becoming a poem.
O lolling Orphic head silently howling,
my own head rises from its surf of cloud.

Slowly my body grows a single sound,
slowly I become
a bell,
an oval, disembodied vowel,
I grow, an owl,
an aureole, white fire.

I watch the moonstruck image of the moon burn,
a candle mesmerized by its own aura,
and turn
my hot, congealing face, towards that forked mountain
which wedges the drowned singer.

That frozen glare,
that morsured, classic petrifaction.
Haven't you sworn off such poems for this year,
and no more on the moon?

Why are you gripped by demons of inaction?
Whose silence shrieks so soon?

"Morsured," by the way, is an archaic word meaning bitten.