Content Warning: blood, injury
Lorelei Bacht - The Pomegranate Moon
The moon made itself a parchment, rolled up
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its translucence and tied it with a piece of string.
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It tucked itself in my sister’s wicker basket
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and said: Walk me out to my happening.
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And together they walked a silence without stars
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among laurels, pomegranates and pines.
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Having ran out of green, they found the steep
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ravine where the sea beats and sings into granite.
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The moon hissed: Let me down. Can you not see
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the wound lacing me chest to throat,
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each beat gushing a thousand red petals? I am
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no longer me, nor is my house mine anymore.
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Doing as told, my sister let the moon, now cold
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as tears down into the low rumbles of the sea,
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while the wind carried the taste of basil, wove
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its blues into the song of drunken owls.
This poem contains motifs from ‘Romancero gitano’, a poetry collection by Spanish writer Federico GarcÃa Lorca, first published in 1928.
Lorelei Bacht (she/they) is currently running out of ways to define herself, and would like to reside in a tranquil, quiet form of uncertainty for a while. Her recent work has appeared and/or are forthcoming in Anti-Heroin Chic, Visitant, The Wondrous Real, Abridged, Odd Magazine, Postscript, PROEM, SWWIM, Strukturriss, The Inflectionist Review, Hecate, and others. She is also on Instagram: @lorelei.bacht.writer and on Twitter: @bachtlorelei
Photograph: Buck Moon, Thunder Moon, Hay Moon by Tina Hagger
Tina Hagger is an artist based in Kent, England. She is primarily a linocut printmaker but dabbles in many art forms. She is heavily influenced by the county of her birth, Kent, and its beautiful countryside. She particularly loves a wander in the North Kent marshes. As a result, many of her artworks have a theme of the interplay between nature and place. She holds her sense of wonder at nature very dear.