How to Wait 28 and a Half Days

How to wait twenty-eight and a half days
Before writing a line of poetry,
Before doing anything at all
Once you realize your gravity.

Such long distances this monopole
Makes and creates, carves.
Baking new realities — wait,
The moon illuminates, then starves.

Feed on the display of six broken lines
By electricity, divinity, or by hand.
Tap on the app or grab the map.
Remember where this all began?

Wound further the clock quivered,
And many more cycles ago it opened.
Before the keeper of the keys
Went beyond the door and roped in,

And sang the timely beat here
With fear near that pulsating pole.
How must the lunar being do it,
Do anything without counsel

From the skies forever watching
Stretched in tension, remorseful.
Yet from earth's point of you,
Reflecting intelligence, beautiful.

So align the will and begin again,
Shining fractured as you are.
Delight in every transitional blip,
Notate it then restart the radar.

See that center, that ji mystery,
With eight handles’ love and direction,
And magic in its spindle? Turn.
She, again, demands fullest attention

Alongside a moonlit path so indefinite,
An incarnation left contrary.
Everywhere else a consistency;
Sacramental success, peace to carry.

Or not. Oh, to be part of the whole,
The center and without.
Why can’t we celebrate
Both mental ease and the doubt?

For speaking and repeating,
Manifesting and seeking?
Can you feel it all, then have
It washed away, leaking

Through red, black and opened cracks
As all slips through with no grasp
On what’s fixed or clearly defined.
Here the abstract lessons of the past

Meet logical progressions towards
A mutative and raving future.
This, the brightest star proclaims,
Whose Voice, or you, a deified creator.

So what ignites the flame of the canary?
There are many ways to do it,
Save that of homogeneity. Wait,
Says the soot-covered poet

Who samples and regurgitates,
Ignores and embraces an empty design.
No choice but all, the cosmological,
To keep the mythos or resign.

To express a circuitry in the moment
Or stifle and patiently reconsider
All synthetic voices
As gates wax, wane and wither.

How to Wait 28 and a Half Days

An animated reading of the poem...

© 2023 Julie Hannah, Reflections by Design, LLC