Cherubic Hymn

penumbral eclipse

The year always feels a little frontloaded

Top heavy with new beginnings what with being a Capricorn and all

Wolf moon

Full moon penumbral eclipse on this eve of my birth

Diving into 31 and wondering if I would’ve been any different (or in every way different)

If I’d been born a Cancer, or a Taurus

Tonight I could’ve raved a flash of glittered browbones

afire with the radiant energy of a new crush

But I am me, and I’m home, quietly sitting on the couch beside the wood stove

Flanked by dogs

Writing a grocery list 

And while my grocery list always reads like an adventure

Never hold back where food is concerned

I’m trying, on the eve of 31, to make peace with all the quietude

That exists within me

Trying to not feel like I lost something of myself

Between those years where I sped headlong into the night

On my bicycle toward movement and sound

Gently reminding myself, on the night of this cold wolf moon

That while late-night raves are not my comfort zone

There is a magic all its own in a quiet moonlit walk to the river

Or a nod in passing to the coyote with whom (or is it who, for non-human mammals?)

I have become solemnly familiar

As she prowls the edge where field blurs to forest at dusk

May the wisdom of 31 absolve me from ever thinking that 

There’s only one way to inhale the universe