The full moon rising this evening will be a unification of a Super Moon and a Blue Moon.
In 2018 a Blue Moon, Super Moon and Blood Moon coincided for the first time since 1866…
Under the Super Blue Blood Moon.
This cratered trinity last seen when the monarch of the seas tipped its emigrant load into the star-foamed waters of Liverpool, they drowned in the year of a blood moon. This second coming, different faces still pour into the oceans, the Mediterranean anchors its load, boats just wisps of air, their belief in a brighter life as shiny and steadfast as the super moon
where slaves gathered in another country. False hopes of freedom, civil rights and the 14th amendment rose up in their cheeks, blush-pink. And presidents lied under the blue moon, they lied as they threw out grains of light whilst gathering in the right of another, that Long Walk, not civil or virtuous, no longer among the people, Navajo ripped from their land for the shining prospect of gold, minerals, uranium, the fearing time stole all they knew.
They smothered the beautiful people with their ugliness, their scorched-policy, their fired flint hearts, they defiled fresh water, killed and burnt and the wind echoed the trail of tears, fresh weeping water fed the ground that awaited their return when the world before could be restored to beauty under the last super blue blood moon.
A new century awoke, thousands of white moons carving a path in the black night skies hovered over those returned lands, a treaty of sorts gave sovereignty whilst they stole the earth's gifts, each moon stretched down to touch the sacred water of life and reflected back a new treachery, the black snake shedding its oily skin into water and lake and the Bears Ears thieved.
Stealing is in the blood, it waxes and wanes with each inauguration, it gives and takes, it takes, it takes, it takes. Will the world be restored to beauty? Will their voices be restored to beauty? Will it finish in beauty when all the colours of mankind gather under every moon blood, blue, harvest, flower, wolf, worm, snow, thunder, frost and hunter? Will the earth become one circle where there is no beginning and no end?
From the collection ’52 Weeks’ by Jan Woodward. Available at: Housmans, London: https://housmans.com/product/52-weeks/ and the Feminist Bookshop, Brighton: https://thefeministbookshop.com/collections/poetry-plays-and-essays
photo credit: PumpkinSky, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Gardening in the Anthropocene 