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Poetry
by Emily Skov-Nielsen
A Rabbit as Queen of the Moon
You and Maggie leap-wild in the light-blitzed
field peppered with bleach-blond grasses and
an iridescent haze, hallucinated; parched, fevering
for a throat full of Arethusa’s suboceanic stream,
for a glimpse of our lost daughter, sad as the Queen
of Hades abducted by a bat-black chariot that drove
into the earth, a violent opening, those lovely
hell-green flames and the smell, singed violets:
there is no such thing as closure, only open-field loss—
up the rabbit hole she comes, fist-sized, furred
and grey, emerging from the cool chambered warren,
pushing us into a corner of the plain. How strange
for something so young to be seen all alone, stranger
still, the Chinese moon rabbit—some say it threw itself
into a fire to feed an old man; its image etched
in the moon, still swathed in the smoke that cleanly rose
from its untouched, intact body—imagine the godliness,
the loneliness of never losing, never being burned.
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[Distillate © HA&L + Emily Skov-Nielsen | {from the Greek bios} -- the course of a life.]
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