Poetry

 

 

Maria Terrone

Child and Moon

From my window I can see
the children playing Giant Steps.
Gaining and losing ground
like medieval kings at war,
they grow imperious as shadows fall,
their dwarfed faces paling into masks.

And I remember hiding-games after dark,
seeking through a park
with the frenzy of a child's despair,
sure my life hung by a thread
until moonlight flared:
a parasol sprung above my head,
a white flower flung before me
by a bold, munificent power.

 

Giraffes, Once Dismissed as Mute,

speak in a frequency
too low for us to hear,
conversing in their own
music of the spheres —
just as the stripped trees
(comatose, we think)
might be humming
sprightly tunes to one another
on a cracked-ice night
such as this as we lie trussed
in blankets, awake
to the huffing of snow,
syncopation
of winter-weary hearts.

 

 

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