Lorraine Caputo | Poems by moonlight

NIGHT VOYAGE

Platinum crescent
moon boats upon the wind-waves
mosaicked with stars

Through cobwebbed empty
spaces Spirits tango to
the rhythm of night

That breeze whispers through
open windows, caresses
my dreaming body

—
DYING YUNGAS MOON

I.
The near-full moonlight
seeps through quilted clouds
raveling, revealing
a pure-white orb.
II.
The dusk thunder that
had rolled through these
deep jungle valleys
has silenced.
Its lightning still pulses white
from cloud
to cloud.
The eclipsing moon now
& again glimpsed
through the seams
of this night’s sky.

Until she is smothered
beneath a shower.
III.
All Soul’s Eve
I pirouette beneath
the waning moon,
a brilliant pearl
nested upon
rent cotton-wool clouds
silhouetted midnight blue,
billowing towards
the Amazon.
IV.
In the dead hours
ff the Día de los Muertos
waifly fog drifts
through the village.
Phantom palm trees sway
in their swift
passage.
The moon, the stars,
the mountains invisible.

& once departed,
the light of this near-half moon
reveals mountain
silhouettes.
To the solitary song
of a cricket,
higher clouds
slowly thread
scant clouds.
V.
Lightning & thunder vibrate
through the cloud-
veiled sky
of stars &
half-moon.
The valleys, the
cobbled streets
echo with the music
of villagers feasting
with the dead.

—

I DREAM

I dream
in slivers
falling in my night
They capture
pieces of
full-moon light
They drift
on the chilled air
like crystalline
snowflakes
In their midst I stand
trying to capture them

They disappear
& come early morning
only their scattered
pools of shattered
memories remain

—

Lorraine Caputo is a documentary poet, translator and travel writer. Her works appear in over 100 journals in Canada, the US, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Australia and Africa; 11 chapbooks of poetry – including Caribbean Nights (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2014) and her new collection, Notes from the Patagonia (dancing girl press, 2017); and 18 anthologies. She has also authored a dozen travel guidebooks. In March 2011, the Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada chose her verse as poem of the month. Caputo has done over 200 literary readings, from Alaska to the Patagonia. For the past decade, she has been traveling through Latin America, listening to the voices of the pueblos and Earth. Follow her travels at: www.facebook.com/lorrainecaputo.wanderer.