There hung languid thoughts

toward borrowed light.

My shawl dipped in the Red Sea

draped on the tranquility.

 

Above all breathable air,

a distant prayer wrapped

around your cold shoulder.

I stood under the moon of tides.

 

You buoy on the ocean of thin air

and wash out the twinkled little stars.

I threw you thankfulness

and the tassels ricocheted to the sun.

 

Come now moon with your sideways smile

and reflect my prayers like flares.

Send them to the burning and shining

and I will kneel here until morning.

*

“I look up at your macro-skies, dark and enormous,

your handmade sky-jewelry,

Moon and stars mounted in their settings.

Then I look at my micro-self and wonder,

Why do you bother with us?

Why take a second look our way?

Yet we’ve so narrowly missed being gods,

bright with Eden’s dawn light.”

Psalms 8:3-5 The Message

It was either C. S. Lewis or G. K. Chesterton who got me thinking about orbital metaphors such as the sun and the moon. For years now I have labeled the two spheres as representative of God and mankind. The sun the source of light and energy and the moon a receiver and reflector of light and energy. Now that the days shorten I find myself delivering in the early night with the moon glow drawing me to look up. How does it just hang there with no apparent strings attached? This morning I woke up to a moonset. Beautiful and poignant in its muted descent, I felt nicely small. All these issues and dramas in my micro existence are thrown up to orbit as prayers with the moon like a shawl. The goings on down here in this fractal earth try to find some peace in the sea of tranquility. That’s not enough. Even the moon knows its orbit around our sphere is subject to orbit around the sun.

 

The last verse of Psalm 8 confirms ultimate source.

 

“God, brilliant Lord, your name echoes around the world.”

 

The Lord’s mercies are new every morning says the writer of Lamentations. Could his lament have ricocheted off the moonlight to the coming Bright and Morning Star?