[Once in moonlight . . .]
Once in moonlight when I had not slept for three nights,
when there was no food and a long rain had stopped,
and some had slept outside in the rain you could see
the streaks it had left on their skin,
once in the eighth week of my captivity,
alone in the moonlight outside on the ledge,
I looked up and felt the stars move
strangely back and forth, a slow rocking,
as though the Lord were rocking us somehow back and forth,
and I was not afraid but tears came anyway
as I remembered my children so far away,
the way children can call you back
in through your thoughts and keep you awake
like hearing the stars ring all night long.
And when you watch animals die,
when deer die you notice it,
how they don’t cry out—
I could see it in my mind’s eye—
they don’t cry out but lie there, eyes open,
and then they are dead outside of themselves
they are dead but inside themselves
they have joined the earth where they have always been
rocking and rocking.—And so
I was able to sleep a few hours before our next remove,
miles and miles beyond the Great River,
though I had lost track of our place in the world.
John Spaulding, “[Once in moonlight . . .]” from Walking in Stone. Copyright © 1989 by John Spaulding. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
Source:
Walking in Stone
(Wesleyan University Press)